"nospam" wrote

| You're saying it's otherwise on Macs?
|
| for copies done via finder (explorer equivalent), create time is
| preserved.
|

Actually it turns out there is no creation time. Starting
from your links I found explanations of Unix/Linux "mtime"
and "ctime". C stands for change, not creation. The difference
is clearly explained he

http://www.geekride.com/inode-struct...e-mtime-atime/

M is lastMod. C is last time the file data changed in the
filesystem and is usually the same as lastMod. Apple may
call it creation time but that's not even partially accurate.
It would only be creation time when the file is first created,
before it's been changed at all in terms of content,
permissions, etc.

I find this to be rather humorous, in a geeky sort of way.
Microsoft, a company deeply concerned with copyright
income and generally making money from computers,
sees files as digital objects. The object is created and has
a life. A copy is another object. (Naturally. One makes more
money from more copies of copyrighted data.) Meanwhile
the Unix people are so geeky that they find it more relevant
to store a record of activity in terms of the file system
structure on disk than to store the data in terms of human
relevance.

It's reminiscent of the way one can make tempers flare
in Linux newsgroups by merely referring to a "folder". It's
almost guaranteed to result in several fuming geeks, "at
the ends of their ropes" over being exposed to "idiots".
They'll go into long diatribes about how there are
only directories -- listings of files in the file system -- and
that there's no such thing as a folder. Of course there's no
such thing as a file, either, from that point of view. It's
all just multiple levels of abstraction of binary patterns. But
you'll tell them that only at your peril.

Who said this wasn't an existential issue?