I really wasn't clear about what I wanted to say, sorry. birthtime is different from ctime on those systems. Ctime is last change on the inode as parent said.

I really wasn't clear about what I wanted to say, sorry. birthtime is different from ctime on those systems. Ctime is last change on the inode as parent said. I just wanted to note that some Unix systems really store the creation time. See http://www.daemon-systems.org/man/fstat.2.html http://www.daemon-systems.org/man/fstat.2.html for an example.