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doc: add clarification on birthtime in fs stat
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Clarifies the possibility of birthtime in the fs stat
object being greater than atime or mtime when not available
in the filesystem (see issue for further info).

Fixes: #2222
PR-URL: #5479
Reviewed-By: James M Snell <[email protected]>
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kthelgason authored and Myles Borins committed Mar 21, 2016
1 parent d871ae2 commit 1afab6a
Showing 1 changed file with 5 additions and 4 deletions.
9 changes: 5 additions & 4 deletions doc/api/fs.markdown
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -190,10 +190,11 @@ The times in the stat object have the following semantics:
* `birthtime` "Birth Time" - Time of file creation. Set once when the
file is created. On filesystems where birthtime is not available,
this field may instead hold either the `ctime` or
`1970-01-01T00:00Z` (ie, unix epoch timestamp `0`). On Darwin and
other FreeBSD variants, also set if the `atime` is explicitly set to
an earlier value than the current `birthtime` using the `utimes(2)`
system call.
`1970-01-01T00:00Z` (ie, unix epoch timestamp `0`). Note that this
value may be greater than `atime` or `mtime` in this case. On Darwin
and other FreeBSD variants, also set if the `atime` is explicitly
set to an earlier value than the current `birthtime` using the
`utimes(2)` system call.

Prior to Node v0.12, the `ctime` held the `birthtime` on Windows
systems. Note that as of v0.12, `ctime` is not "creation time", and
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