Mar 312008
What is the difference between UNIX Access, Modify, and Change Times?
This is a silly little thing that I consistently forget … or at least forget some of the subtle differences between these three measures.
Here are the definitions of the different UNIX time information on a file with how they are typically referred to in man pages and the option to list the particular time with the ls command.
- Access Time |
atime|-ult - This is the time that the file was last accessed, read or written to.
- Modify Time |
mtime|-lt - This is the last time the actual contents of the file were last modified.
- Change Time |
ctime|-cl - This is the time that the inode information (permissions, name, etc., the metadata, as it were) was last modified.
Hello. Your site displays incorrectly in Explorer, but content excellent! Thanks for your wise words:)
I changed the theme and everything should be good now in that wrotten internet exploder browser.
mtime and ctime should be vice versa, see “man 2 stat”
Right you are! Bah, I always get them turned around! Thanks. I have fixed up the post.
Cheers
Access time doesn’t change when the file contents are written to, but both modify and change times do.
[...] Also, Access, Change, Modify [...]
[...] http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/2802/what-is-the-difference-between-modify-and-change-in-stat-command-context http://blog.rootsmith.ca/linux/unix-access-modify-and-change-times/ [...]