Whats "Birth" field in stat command output

I'm using Fedora-16 with ext4.Suddenly with stat command I can see something called "Birth".

# stat history_file1.txt 
  File: `history_file1.txt'
  Size: 8944            Blocks: 24         IO Block: 4096   regular file
Device: 802h/2050d      Inode: 4192        Links: 1
Access: (0600/-rw-------)  Uid: (    0/    root)   Gid: (    0/    root)
Context: unconfined_u:object_r:admin_home_t:s0
Access: 2012-01-18 18:11:10.799900150 +0530
Modify: 2012-01-18 18:11:10.867908793 +0530
Change: 2012-01-18 18:11:10.867908793 +0530
 Birth: -

search man page show instances of birth

%w Time of file birth, human-readable; - if unknown

%W Time of file birth, seconds since Epoch; 0 if unknown

Is this newly added field? where this field is stored with respect to inode ?


Solution 1:

This is the "birth" time of a specific file - the moment when it was created on the file system. This attribute is new to ext4 and is also known as crtime or btime, just google it. :)

Here you can find a discussion regarding the stat command and the specific output you're seeing.