OSX - How to get the creation & modification time of a file from the command line

Question

While solving some programming puzzle, I wanted to see how long it took me to write a solution to the problem. To do so, I thought it'd be a good idea to compare the file creation date with the latest modification date.

In the terminal (OSX), I tried the following command and was surprised to see the same date three times in a row:

stat my_file.py 16777220 10280844 -rw-r--r-- 1 username staff 0 7214 \ "Dec  5 08:32:39 2015"  \ "Dec  5 08:32:39 2015"  \ "Dec  5 08:32:39 2015"  \ "Dec  5 08:32:39 2015" 4096 16 0 my_file.py 

The way I created then modified the file:

touch my_file.py vim my_file.py   # <- modify some content stat my_file.py 

Any idea on how to get these two dates from the command line?

Clarification: I do not want to time the execution time of the script.

EDIT : The issue was with vim changing the creation date on save, the accepted answer still answers the question in depth for those who are interested.

Answer 1

stat reports the standard Unix dates, last access time, last modification time, and inode change time (which is often mistaken for creation time). Mac OS X also maintains the file creation time, and it's accessible using the GetFileInfo command:

$ GetFileInfo -d .bash_profile 10/08/2015 09:26:35 

Here's a more complete example:

$ ls -l my_file.py ls: my_file.py: No such file or directory $ touch my_file.py $ stat -x my_file.py   File: "my_file.py"   Size: 0            FileType: Regular File   Mode: (0644/-rw-r--r--)         Uid: (  501/     blm)  Gid: (   20/   staff) Device: 1,5   Inode: 26863832    Links: 1 Access: Sun Dec  6 13:47:24 2015 Modify: Sun Dec  6 13:47:24 2015 Change: Sun Dec  6 13:47:24 2015 $ GetFileInfo my_file.py file: "/Users/blm/my_file.py" type: "\0\0\0\0" creator: "\0\0\0\0" attributes: avbstclinmedz created: 12/06/2015 13:47:24 modified: 12/06/2015 13:47:24 $ echo hello >my_file.py $ stat -x my_file.py   File: "my_file.py"   Size: 6            FileType: Regular File   Mode: (0644/-rw-r--r--)         Uid: (  501/     blm)  Gid: (   20/   staff) Device: 1,5   Inode: 26863832    Links: 1 Access: Sun Dec  6 13:47:24 2015 Modify: Sun Dec  6 13:47:35 2015 Change: Sun Dec  6 13:47:35 2015 $ GetFileInfo my_file.py file: "/Users/blm/my_file.py" type: "\0\0\0\0" creator: "\0\0\0\0" attributes: avbstclinmedz created: 12/06/2015 13:47:24 modified: 12/06/2015 13:47:35 $ cat my_file.py hello $ stat -x my_file.py   File: "my_file.py"   Size: 6            FileType: Regular File   Mode: (0644/-rw-r--r--)         Uid: (  501/     blm)  Gid: (   20/   staff) Device: 1,5   Inode: 26863832    Links: 1 Access: Sun Dec  6 13:47:54 2015 Modify: Sun Dec  6 13:47:35 2015 Change: Sun Dec  6 13:47:35 2015 $ GetFileInfo my_file.py file: "/Users/blm/my_file.py" type: "\0\0\0\0" creator: "\0\0\0\0" attributes: avbstclinmedz created: 12/06/2015 13:47:24 modified: 12/06/2015 13:47:35 

Note that using vim to test this may be misleading because vim will write your modified file to a new temporary file, then rename the old one and the new one, so the creation time will be updated to when the file was written. See this post for a workaround I came up with for that.