Unfortunately, you can't get an absolute creation time of a file under Unix (not even with your command line). What your command line gets is the same as the 11th field of Perl
, which is the inode change time. An inode contains the meta information of a file (size etc). Whenever you do something that changes the inode (e.g. add to it, so its size changes), the ctime is updated. There is no way to get the creation time of a file from the filesystem.