[CentralOH] os.stat

[Mark Erbaugh]

I'm working on a program that needs to extract a date* from a file and
I'm using the os.stat function.  I'm running Ubuntu Linux.

import os
import stat
import datetime

datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(os.stat[stat.ST_CTIME])

On several files that I've tested, this code returns the same date that
I get from ls -l. However, for one file, the time is off by about 8
seconds.  It this a rounding issue or is it actually retrieving a
different date?  Or is it something else altogether?

Thanks,
Mark

* ideally the creation date, but from the Python docs, it looks like
under Unix (and I assume Linux) it is actually the date of the last
metadata change (whatever that is).