ctime, atime and mtime
It is important to distinguish between a file or directory ’s change time (ctime), access time (atime), and modify time (mtime).
ctime -- In UNIX, it is not possible to tell the actual creation time of a file. The ctime–change time–is the time when changes were made to the file or directory ’s inode (owner, permissions, etc.). It is needed by the dump command to determine if the file needs to be backed up. You can view the ctime with the ls -lc command.
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