How to get creation date of files

How can I get the creation date of file? I can get modified date with dir command but not the creation date.

Answer 1

[Stephen Cobeldick]

Try this FEX submission:

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/24671-filetime

Or on windows you can call the DOS command:

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/100248-is-it-possible-to-obtain-the-creation-date-of-a-directory-or-file-in-matlab-7-5-r2007b

but their advice is not quite correct, it actually needs to be like this:

>> [~,str] = dos('dir /T:C *.m');
>> rgx = '(\d{4}\.\d{2}\.\d{2}\.\s+\d{2}:\d{2})\s+\d+\s+([^\n]+)';
>> tkn = regexp(str,rgx,'tokens');
>> tkn{:}
ans = 
    '2016.03.02.  11:51'    'startup.m'
ans = 
    '2016.06.07.  15:29'    'Untitled.m'

And then it reads the creation date perfectly!

[Gen]

Thank you very much Stephen. It seems I need Windows. Do you know anything work with Mac like this??

[Stephen Cobeldick]

POSIX (which MAC OS X is compliant with) does not require the storage of the file creation date. Linux does not store this. But apparently OSX does keep this information somehow.... use your favorite internet search engine and you will find the required commands. Then you just need to find a way to call them from MATLAB (probably via system). Good luck!

[Gen]

Thank you very much.

I'll try these program.

Answer 2

[Guillaume]

On windows you can simply delegate to .Net

d = system.IO.File.GetCreationTime(fullpath)

[Austin Spencer]

Thanks for the info, this is a nice clean solution! By comparison parsing the return from "dir" seems to be very fragile and is inherently platform dependent.

One correction: at least for my case, "system" must be capitalized.

d = System.IO.File.GetCreationTime(fullpath);

The resulting .NET DateTime object can then be converted into a MATLAB datetime object.

creationDateTime = datetime(d.Year, d.Month, d.Day, d.Hour, d.Minute, d.Second);

Answer 3

[Tim Lueth]

On Mac OSX (tested 2019-01-29 using Mojave and Matlab R2018a) use:

[a,b]=system('GetFileInfo myfile.m'); s=strfind(b,'created: ')+9; crdat=b(s:s+18)

or

fname='myfile.m'
[a,b]=system(sprintf('GetFileInfo "%s"',fname)); s=strfind(b,'created: ')+9; crdat=b(s:s+18)
datestr(datenum(crdat))