How to get proper file creation date of file?

Question

I need not last modification time and not last file accessed time, but file creation time. I have not found information about this. Maybe some libs?

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Answer 1

You won't be able to do this across all systems, since not all systems even record that information. Linux doesn't, for instance; see this SO thread.

Many programs "modify" a file by copying it, making a change on the copy, and then moving the copy to the original file's location. So for those, there's not a meaningful distinction between creation and last-modification.

Answer 2

As yshavit said, not all operating systems record the date created. However, you should be able to use java.nio.file to determine this information on operating systems that do have this functionality - see the documentation for files.getAttribute - note that BasicFileAttributeView has a field for creationTime.

You can use FileSystems.getDefault(); to determine what FileAttributeViews are supported on the current operating system.

Files.getAttribute(path, "basic:createdAt"); will return a FileTime object with the date the file was created on a system that supports BasicFileAttributeView. You'll have to convert it to a java.util.Date object, but I'll let you figure that out on your own.

Further Reading

• NIO API for getAttribute()
• NIO API for BasicFileAttributeView
• A tutorial for using readAttributes()
• A comprehensive tutorial on using FileAttributes
• Another StackOverflow thread on the same topic

Answer 3

How to get the creation date of a file in Java, using BasicFileAttributes class, this is an example:

   Path path = Paths.get("C:\\Users\\jorgesys\\workspaceJava\\myfile.txt");
    BasicFileAttributes attr;
    try {
    attr = Files.readAttributes(path, BasicFileAttributes.class);

    System.out.println("Creation date: " + attr.creationTime());

    } catch (IOException e) {
    System.out.println("oops error! " + e.getMessage());
    }