in reply to sort by date

by creation date
Well, no matter how hard you try, you can't get creation date on Unix. Unix doesn't maintain a "creation date", which the founders of Unix argued doesn't actually make sense (and I agree, sometimes).

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
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Re: •Re: sort by date
by dpmott (Scribe) on Dec 01, 2003 at 05:22 UTC
    Yes... that's true on UNIX but not on Win32...

    From perldoc perlport:
       stat
      ctime not supported on UFS (Mac OS X).
      ctime is creation time instead of inode change time (Win32).

    [download]
    So, if the author is only trying to write code on a Win32 platform, with no cares or worries wrt portable code, then (s)he *can* get the creation time.

    But don't do that.

    You almost certainly want to know which file has newer or older *content* than the others, i.e. which has been modified most (or least) recently.

    :)
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