windows - How to discover a File's creation time with Java?

Question

Is there an easy way to discover a File's creation time with Java? The File class only has a method to get the "last modified" time. According to some resources I found on Google, the File class doesn't provide a getCreationTime() method because not all file systems support the idea of a creation time.

The only working solution I found involes shelling out the the command line and executing the "dir" command, which looks like it outputs the file's creation time. I guess this works, I only need to support Windows, but it seems very error prone to me.

Are there any third party libraries that provide the info I need?

Update: In the end, I don't think it's worth it for me to buy the third party library, but their API does seem pretty good so it's probably a good choice for anyone else that has this problem.

Answer 1

With the release of Java 7 there is a built-in way to do this:

Path path = Paths.get("path/to/file");
BasicFileAttributes attributes = Files.readAttributes(path, BasicFileAttributes.class);
FileTime creationTime = attributes.creationTime();

It is important to note that not all operating systems provide this information. I believe in those instances this returns the mtime which is the last modified time.

Windows does provide creation time.