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.

:)