It's a myth that you can get the absolute creation time of a file under Unix. No such information is stored. Besides, when is a file created? Suppose a file named orig is created at time T₀, and at time T₁ happens one of the following:

    mv orig new
    mv orig /some/other/file/system/new
    cp orig new
    ln orig new
    echo "Foo" >> orig
    echo "Foo" >  orig
    vi orig
    cp /etc/password orig
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What would be the "absolute creation time" of new, and what happens to the "absolute creation time" of orig in all those cases?

Abigail