File Times (mtime, ctime, atime)

Unlike Windiws, you can not determine when a file was created. Instead, you can only determine three things:

1. atime -- the time in which a file was accessed. This includes viewing the contents of the file or executinng a shell script.
   

   $ cat example_file

2. ctime -- the time in which a file's inode (owner, group, and permissions) and when the file's contents were last changed. To view the files ctime with the ls command use the -lc flags.
   

   $ chown root:root example_file

3. mtime -- is the time in which a files conntents have been modified. This differs from the ctime as it will not reflect when the permissions were modified.
   

   $ echo "Hello!" >> example_file