What is the difference between ctime and mtime

An alternative to ls is the stat command. It makes it easier to check all three times at once. It also gets around the problem of the unintuitive -u flag.

The touch command changes the modification and access times of a file. By default, it will set mtime and atime to the current time. You can set a different time with the -t flag:.

You can also set only mtime or atime with the -m and -a flags respectively:. The find command is another tool that acts on timestamps. It can filter files based on atime, ctime, or mtime. For example:.

The most commonly referenced file timestamp is mtime. This is the date and time that a file listing shows, for example. In particular, always remember that ctime represents change time, not creation time. Best Portable Monitors.

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Best iPhones. Best External Hard Drives. Browse All News Articles. Smart TVs Ads. Team Comes to Workplace by Meta. Block People Spotify. Verizon Selling PS5. Windows 11 SE Explained. Windows 11 SE. Microsoft Default Browser Firefox. Google's New Pet Art. See this thread. Ls -l displays ctime or mtime? Shell Programming and Scripting. Can find actually use this granularity? As you can see below, I thought that was because of tmpwatch. Hi I've made some test with perl script to learn more about mtime Cheers, Nilesh 5 Replies.

Tips and Tutorials. Unix keeps 3 timestamps for each file: mtime, ctime, and atime. Most people seem to understand atime access time , it is when the file was last read. There does seem to be some confusion between mtime and ctime though.

And this is canceled by adding noatime, which does not mean true feelings. Anyway, all three time stamps are placed in the inode. If mtime, atime is modified, the inode must be changed. Since the inode is changed, then ctime is also Followed by changes.

Tech Community Register Log in. The difference between ctime, mtime, atime in linux. FaceBook Share. Don't believe them The following is the content of my man, for reference only!