Re: Extract CTIME in zsh 4.2.3?

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Aug 22,  1:27am, Timothy Luoma wrote:
}
} I've found a solution, but this will only work with Tiger (Mac OS X  
} version 10.4.x)...
} 
} kMDItemFSCreationDate            The date an item's file was created.

In other words, what you're looking for is some record of the inode
creation time, rather than the inode change time which is what the
stat ctime refers to.

Unfortunately this information simply does not exist on many kinds of
filesystems for OSs whose names have an N in the middle and an X at
the end.  (If I write such an OS sometime, I'll call it ANIMAX.  You
read it here first.)
 
} If there's a more portable way to get this to work, I'd like to learn  
} about it, but this will work for now.

On filesystems derived (as in code was taken, not just inspired by like
the linux ext filesystems) from BSD's FFS, I *think* you can get this
with "ffsinfo -i N" where N is the inode number (which you have to get
some other way, e.g. with stat).  It's called the "birth time".  Please
note, though, that I may be entirely wrong -- the man page for ffsinfo
doesn't say what data is dumped, and I don't have a BSDish system handy
to try it.