[R] Does file.info man page describe ctime corrrectly?

Graham Williams Graham.Williams at togaware.com
Fri Dec 19 10:13:26 CET 2008


(R 2.8.0 on Debian GNU/Linux sid)

?file.info contains:

mtime, ctime, atime: integer of class '"POSIXct"': file modification,
          creation and last access times.

This implies that ctime is "file [...] creation [...] time"

Has R implemented ctime differently to Unix? 

I understand, on Linux at least, that ctime is the last change time
(not the creation time). See "man ls" which says:

       -c [...] ctime (time of last modification of file status
        information) [...]

However, testing seems to indicate file.info is returning the change
time, not creation time (I'm not sure we can actually determine
creation time of a file on Linux).

Perhaps just a file.info documentation slip?

Regards,
Graham



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