Checking out old files WITH original create/modified timestamps

Question

Is there a way to know or get the original create/modified timestamps?

Answer 1

YES, metastore or git-cache-meta can store such (meta-)information! Git by itself, without third-party tools, can't. Metastore or git-cache-meta can store any file metadata for a file.

That is by design, as metastore or git-cache-meta are intended for that very purpose, as well as supporting backup utilities and synchronization tools.

Answer 2

I believe that the only timestamps recorded in the Git database are the author and commit timestamps. I don't see an option for Git to modify the file's timestamp to match the most recent commit, and it makes sense that this wouldn't be the default behavior (because if it were, Makefiles wouldn't work correctly).

You could write a script to set the modification date of your files to the the time of the most recent commit. It might look something like this:

# No arguments? Recursively list all git-controlled files in $PWD and start over if [ $# = 0 ]; then   git ls-files -z |xargs -0 sh "$0"   exit $? fi  for file in "$@"; do   time="$(git log --pretty=format:%cd -n 1 \                   --date=format:%Y%m%d%H%M.%S --date-order -- "$file")"   if [ -z "$time" ]; then     echo "ERROR: skipping '$file' -- no git log found" >&2     continue   fi   touch -m -t "$time" "$file" done 

This accepts specific files as arguments or else updates each git-controlled file in the current directory or its children. This is done in a manner that permits spaces and even line breaks in filenames since git ls-files -z outputs a null-terminated file list and xargs -0 parses null-terminated lists into arguments.

This will take a while if you have a lot of files.