Arch Linux

Cleophas

Member

Registered: 2009-02-08

Posts: 8

JFS creation timestamp

Greetings!

I am new to Arch, but not necessarily to Linux.  I have recently moved back from the Windows world and would like to bring over all of my data files and documents from NTFS.   The problem I am having with this involves creation timestamps.  I would like to preserve these in the Linux system.  Strangely, many linux filesystems do not track this piece of information about a file.  I found that JFS has many benefits including creation timestamp meta data.  I set up a spare drive with JFS and rsynced my NTFS data over to it, only to find I couldn't see how to get or set this creation timestamp through 'ls' or otherwise.  I did find a thread somewhere that mentioned you could use jfs_debugfs to see the creation timestamp value as di_otime if you provided that tool the files inode.  But it is hexadecimal format and this seems a rather convoluted way to access this information, not to mention doing anything programmatically on a mass scale with the creation timestamp information for a file.

Is there any higher level way to get and set the creation timestamp data on a file in JFS?  Getting would be sufficient if I could verify that the creation timestamp is getting preserved properly after the rsync from NTFS to JFS.

Thank you for any assistance.

Cleophas

Member

Registered: 2009-02-08

Posts: 8

Re: JFS creation timestamp

Anyone?

Ranguvar

Member

Registered: 2008-08-12

Posts: 2,577

Re: JFS creation timestamp

Doesn't look promising, but this is interesting: http://www.mail-archive.com/jfs-discuss … 00419.html

General Googling says Linux (and other Unices) doesn't preserve creation time. It does, however, store a time that's the last time the file's metadata was modified. Things like renames and permission changes will also trigger this though.

perbh

Member

From: Republic of Texas

Registered: 2005-03-04

Posts: 765

Re: JFS creation timestamp

'ls -l' ? ok - it gives the latest modification date - which - I guess - is what you are really after

<edit>
eeeek - ya beat me to it!
and - yes, obviously, any change (permissions/owner) will have the last modified time
</edit>

Last edited by perbh (2009-03-03 16:17:57)