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[William R. Wing (Bill Wing)]

On Jun 6, 2012, at 9:29 AM, Alain Ketterlin wrote:

> loial <jldunn2000 at gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> I have a requirement to test the creation time of a file with the
>> current time and raise a message if the file is  more than 15 minutes
>> old.
>> Platform is Unix.
>> I have looked at using os.path.getctime for the file creation time and
>> time.time() for the current time, but is this the best approach?
> 
> No. getctime() returns the last "change" time. The creation time is not
> kept anywhere. This may still match your requirement though. And os.path
> is the right package to look at for such tasks.
> 
> -- Alain.
> -- 
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

If you REALLY want the creation time rather than the last time the file was touched, you will probably have to invoke the subprocess module and call ls -U, something like the following:

creation_time = subprocess.check_output(["ls", "-U", string_filename_variable])

The -U option isn't universal, but it does exist in most of the UNIces I'm familiar with.

-Bill