This really is a topic for R-devel ... see the posting guide.
On Fri, 19 Dec 2008, Graham Williams wrote:
(R 2.8.0 on Debian GNU/Linux sid)
?file.info contains:
mtime, ctime, atime: integer of class '"POSIXct"': file modification,
creation and last access times.
This implies that ctime is "file [...] creation [...] time"
Has R implemented ctime differently to Unix?
I understand, on Linux at least, that ctime is the last change time
(not the creation time). See "man ls" which says:
-c [...] ctime (time of last modification of file status
information) [...]
'man stat' would be more definitive, and
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap04.html#tag_04_07
even more so (but only for POSIX-compliant OSes). As you will see, there
is considerable room for interpretation even under POSIX.
However, testing seems to indicate file.info is returning the change
time, not creation time (I'm not sure we can actually determine
creation time of a file on Linux).
Perhaps just a file.info documentation slip?
Well, to call it 'last change' would indeed be a documentation slip.
What it does depends on the OS and file system, but on Linux it is the
last *status* change, which is often the creation time (modifying the file
does not necessarily change the status). On Windows it *is* the creation
time, and that means it is too on a SMB-mounted Windows file system on
Linux.
--
Brian D. Ripley, rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
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