Hey, Bluto, Thanks for the answer. I've had several responses explaining how I've misinterpreted, mishandled, and/or misused the data returned by stat(). Maybe I'll revisit it.

OTOH, things on the "ls" front keep getting more and more confusing. I've been using ls with the -u flag for "access time" and the -c flag for "modification time."

Now it seems that what I *might* want is the default time returned by ls without any date-related flag because the -c flag hooks things like chmod, chown, etc., while the default hooks only changes to the file's data. Hmmm.....

Thanks again!