cbarrick, 6 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

FWIW, the stat structure in Linux does not include birth time [1]. It only gives you:

1. atime: The time of last access.
2. mtime: The time of last modification.
3. ctime: The time of the last change to the inode.

I assume the stat command is using a filesystem-specific method to get the birth time.

Anyway, I don’t think any of these stats is guaranteed to be consistent with the rest (or even correct). For example, it is common to disable atime tracking to improve I/O performance.

Assuming the data is accurate, I think the other comment about the file being a copy is the best explanation.