File creation time on Windows vs Linux

Solution 1:

Linux does not store the file creation time. So, you will not be able to view such information on a Linux machine.

Here is a link that shows the inode data structure. You can find:

time_t                       i_atime;
time_t                       i_mtime;
time_t                       i_ctime;

None of these is creation time.

Solution 2:

FIle creation time is not stored anywhere in linux partitions so stat is only displayin following :

atime (access time)
mtime (last modification time)
ctime (last status change)

Solution 3:

Some newer Linux file systems are supporting information (within their inodes) about file creation time, such as JFS, ext4 or btrfs. But traditional Unix and Linux file system did not support it and so the whole tool chain is not aware of such feature yet.

So eventhough smbfs/cifs could have access to this information, there is no place yet to report this information in the stat structure:

struct stat {
  dev_t     st_dev;     /* ID of device containing file */
  ino_t     st_ino;     /* inode number */
  mode_t    st_mode;    /* protection */
  nlink_t   st_nlink;   /* number of hard links */
  uid_t     st_uid;     /* user ID of owner */
  gid_t     st_gid;     /* group ID of owner */
  dev_t     st_rdev;    /* device ID (if special file) */
  off_t     st_size;    /* total size, in bytes */
  blksize_t st_blksize; /* blocksize for file system I/O */
  blkcnt_t  st_blocks;  /* number of 512B blocks allocated */
  time_t    st_atime;   /* time of last access */
  time_t    st_mtime;   /* time of last modification */
  time_t    st_ctime;   /* time of last status change */
};