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Full Discussion: mtime vs ctime
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers mtime vs ctime Post 57480 by zazzybob on Friday 29th of October 2004 06:02:12 AM
Old 10-29-2004
ctime refers to changes made to the file's inode (such as changing permissions, etc). mtime refers to changes to the data within the file. So cnewer will use a reference files inode change time for the comparision, whereas newer will use a reference files data modification time.

Some manual pages are very vague and don't make a clear distinction, so your confusion is understandable!

FYI, there's also atime, which refers to file access time. Also, there is, unfortunately (and to the best of my knowledge), no way of finding file creation time through an inode.

Cheers
ZB
 

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FILECTIME(3)								 1							      FILECTIME(3)

filectime - Gets inode change time of file

SYNOPSIS
int filectime (string $filename) DESCRIPTION
Gets the inode change time of a file. PARAMETERS
o $filename - Path to the file. RETURN VALUES
Returns the time the file was last changed, or FALSE on failure. The time is returned as a Unix timestamp. EXAMPLES
Example #1 A filectime(3) example <?php // outputs e.g. somefile.txt was last changed: December 29 2002 22:16:23. $filename = 'somefile.txt'; if (file_exists($filename)) { echo "$filename was last changed: " . date("F d Y H:i:s.", filectime($filename)); } ?> ERRORS
/EXCEPTIONS Upon failure, an E_WARNING is emitted. NOTES
Note Note: In most Unix filesystems, a file is considered changed when its inode data is changed; that is, when the permissions, owner, group, or other metadata from the inode is updated. See also filemtime(3) (which is what you want to use when you want to create "Last Modified" footers on web pages) and fileatime(3). Note Note also that in some Unix texts the ctime of a file is referred to as being the creation time of the file. This is wrong. There is no creation time for Unix files in most Unix filesystems. Note Note that time resolution may differ from one file system to another. Note The results of this function are cached. See clearstatcache(3) for more details. Tip As of PHP 5.0.0, this function can also be used with some URL wrappers. Refer to "Supported Protocols and Wrappers" to determine which wrappers support stat(3) family of functionality. SEE ALSO
filemtime(3). PHP Documentation Group FILECTIME(3)
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