PHP how can I get file creation date

Question

I am reading a folder with lots of files   How can I get the creation date of a file  I don t see any direct function to get it   There are filemtime and filectime   And if the file hasn t been modified  what will happen

User · Answer

Unfortunately if you are running on linux you cannot access the information as only the last modified date is stored.

It does slightly depend on your filesystem tho. I know that ext2 and ext3 do not support creation time but I think that ext4 does.

User · Answer

Use filectime  For Windows it will return the creation time  and for Unix the change time which is the best you can get because on Unix there is no creation time  in most filesystems       Note also that in some Unix texts the   ctime of a file is referred to as   being the creation time of the file    This is wrong  There is no creation   time for Unix files in most Unix   filesystems

User · Answer

I know this topic is super old  but  in case if someone s looking for an answer  as me  I m posting my solution   This solution works IF you don t mind having some extra data at the beginning of your file   Basically  the idea is to  if file is not existing  to create it and append current date at the first line  Next  you can read the first line with fgets fopen  file   r     turn it into a DateTime object or anything  you can obviously use it raw  unless you saved it in a weird format  and voila - you have your creation date  For example my script to refresh my log file every 30 days looks like this   if  file exists  logfile                  now   new DateTime                 date created   fgets fopen  logfile   r                 if   date created                          file put contents  logfile  date  Y-m-d H i s   PHP EOL  FILE APPEND   LOCK EX                              date created   new DateTime  date created                expiry    date created- gt modify    30 days                if   now  gt    expiry                    unlink  logfile

User · Answer

This is the example code taken from the PHP documentation here  https   www php net manual en function filemtime php    outputs e g   somefile txt was last changed  December 29 2002 22 16 23    filename    somefile txt    if  file exists  filename          echo  quot  filename was last modified   quot    date   quot F d Y H i s  quot   filemtime  filename       The code specifies the filename  then checks if it exists and then displays the modification time using filemtime    filemtime   takes 1 parameter which is the path to the file  this can be relative or absolute

[php] PHP: how can I get file creation date?

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