Preserving target file's creation date

[RW]

On Thu, 1 Oct 2020 13:41:13 +0200
Polytropon wrote:


>  So if you want to keep
> all three timestamps identical, you'll have to combine both tasks.

There are four timestamps: atime, mtime, ctime and btime.

The first two are data access and modification. ctime is when the
metadata in the inode was last modified, the 'c' is for changed, not
created.

btime is time the file/inode was created (b for birth), but it's not
portable.

I just had a look at some files I recently copied with dump|restore and
it had preserved all 4 times. I also found:

cp -p preserved atime, mtime and btime.

rsync -a preserved mtime and btime

I find the last two results strange as cp(1) and rsync(1) don't claim
to preserve btime. I'd be surprised if rsync even knows about it.