How to get file creation & modification date/times in Python?

Question

I have a script that needs to do some stuff based on file creation & modification dates but has to run on Linux & Windows.

Answer 1

I was able to get creation time on posix by running the system's stat command and parsing the output.

commands.getoutput('stat FILENAME').split('\"')[7]

Running stat outside of python from Terminal (OS X) returned:

805306374 3382786932 -rwx------ 1 km staff 0 1098083 "Aug 29 12:02:05 2013" "Aug 29 12:02:05 2013" "Aug 29 12:02:20 2013" "Aug 27 12:35:28 2013" 61440 2150 0 testfile.txt

... where the fourth datetime is the file creation (rather than ctime change time as other comments noted).