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In the man of find the -ctime is said to be :

-ctime n 
          File status was last changed n*24 hours ago.  See the comments
          for -atime to understand how rounding affects the interpretation
          of file status change times.

-atime n
          File  was  last  accessed n*24 hours ago.  When find figures out
          how many 24-hour periods ago the file  was  last  accessed,  any
          fractional part is ignored, so to match -atime +1, a file has to
          have been accessed at least two days ago.

I know from here that the ext4 file system stores the creation date , and you can get it using stats , is the status change times they are talking about in the manual the same as the one given by stats ? or precisely , is the ctime the date of creation of a file ?

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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Kingofkech
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1 Answers1

3

No, it is the date of the last status change to the file, i.e. writes to file data or metadata.

Further reading

JdeBP
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  • i need to perform a find of a files that have not been created in more then 30 days , so -ctime +30 will not work ? – Kingofkech Oct 18 '17 at 12:59
  • @Kingofkech If the files haven't been modified at all since creation, then it will. If they have had permissions, ownership, name, or size changes (among other things), it won't. – Austin Hemmelgarn Oct 18 '17 at 15:29