Dave,
Yeah, I took a look at the unix stat to see what it shows and indeed it does retrieve the information I'm looking for.
However, I would much rather have DIR go after that birth/create date as opposed to having to rely on stat.
Indeed, looking into this further I found the following succint summary: "...POSIX standard only defines three distinct timestamps to be stored for each file: the time of last data access, the time of last data modification, and the time the file status last changed...".
In our case, using the specific folder example, I see the following (see attachment).
...and the matching stat on 'doc' returns:
[G:\usr\share]stat doc
File: doc
Size: 0 Blocks: 32 IO Block: 49152 directory
Device: 5647h/22087d Inode: 17446411450310105587 Links: 1
Access: (0755/drwxr-xr-x) Uid: ( 0/ root) Gid: ( 0/ root)
Access: 2020-03-27 08:28:00.000000000 -0400
Modify: 2020-09-11 22:01:36.000000000 -0400
Change: 2020-09-11 22:01:36.000000000 -0400
Birth: 2017-11-11 23:09:14.000000000 -0500
So basically our WPS 'last write' is the unix modify & change, unless the specific case is more detailed like what you showed where there is a real distinction between Modify and Change.
Alright, so given that our very own 'DIR' is a bit of a dead-end I crafted the following stat command instead:
'stat -c "%.16w %15F %10s %n" *'
which produces the following output:
2020-08-21 11:56 regular file 8909 g:\tmp\uniaud
2005-03-27 14:14 regular file 221407 g:\tmp\unzip32.dll
2020-04-04 21:09 directory 0 g:\tmp\vslick
2014-08-02 10:22 regular file 12838045 g:\tmp\warsaw-pact.pdf
2017-09-21 10:52 regular file 6279 g:\tmp\whois_new
2017-09-21 10:52 regular file 6279 g:\tmp\whois_old
2018-08-25 18:20 directory 0 g:\tmp\Youtube
2018-08-25 18:20 directory 0 g:\tmp\yum_rpm
2020-03-13 10:46 regular file 1082760 g:\tmp\[MS-RDPEMT].pdf
2011-01-23 22:06 regular file 25187216 g:\tmp\~FFJOIN.avi
2011-01-03 23:37 regular file 7534 g:\tmp\~ffmpeg-1.log
2017-06-13 17:31 regular file 4436 g:\tmp\~ffmpeg.P1-0.log
This is good enough. I'll simply define an ALIAS for DIRC to point to stat instead and run with that, actually several ALIASes to show the: create, last access and last modify dates.