PHP: how can I get file creation date?

I am reading a folder with lots of files.

How can I get the creation date of a file. I don't see any direct function to get it.

There are filemtime and filectime.

And if the file hasn't been modified, what will happen?

Solution 1:

Use filectime. For Windows it will return the creation time, and for Unix the change time which is the best you can get because on Unix there is no creation time (in most filesystems).

Note also that in some Unix texts the ctime of a file is referred to as being the creation time of the file. This is wrong. There is no creation time for Unix files in most Unix filesystems.

Solution 2:

This is the example code taken from the PHP documentation here: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.filemtime.php

// outputs e.g.  somefile.txt was last changed: December 29 2002 22:16:23.

$filename = 'somefile.txt';

if (file_exists($filename)) {

    echo "$filename was last modified: " . date ("F d Y H:i:s.", filemtime($filename));
}

The code specifies the filename, then checks if it exists and then displays the modification time using filemtime().

filemtime() takes 1 parameter which is the path to the file, this can be relative or absolute.

Solution 3:

Unfortunately if you are running on linux you cannot access the information as only the last modified date is stored.

It does slightly depend on your filesystem tho. I know that ext2 and ext3 do not support creation time but I think that ext4 does.