How to check how old is our home ?

[Menard]

Hello

As I have home on another partition and many new successives installations of Mint keeping the same home, I ask you because I tried to see in it by the file dates but nothing found, is older than january 2001 and it is not the reality I expected ... but I moved this home from a partition to another, at a time too, or I copied it
I regret not to have journalized this activity, as I ve done for the root partitions

[Cosmo.]

What you need are the creation time stamps, but you have to activate them. Details depend from the unknown desktop environment.

[Menard]

Oh, yes, it s cinnamon but I generally display the column "creation time" so probably I didn't see here any difference with the modification time

I am searching for an application which keeps logs with date, in those I had, and whose history is not reset on demand, not a browser's history for example

[Cosmo.]

Do you speak about your home? Do you have made hidden files visible? What about the file .sudo_as_admin_successful in your home? It is a zero byte file and even the modification date should be as old as your account.

[Menard]

Yes I allways unhide all
This file is 20210222, so newer than the oldests which are 20210104 date when I installed LM 20

[AZgl1800]

Oh, yes, it s cinnamon but I generally display the column "creation time" so probably I didn't see here any difference with the modification time

I am searching for an application which keeps logs with date, in those I had, and whose history is not reset on demand, not a browser's history for example

I changed NEMO to display "modification time", as "Creation Time" is totally useless.

I have folders dated back to 2001, but the files can be as recent as 5 minutes ago.

[Menard]

I don't agree because when I download a file, it happens quite often the modification date is far older than the date of the download, so without the creation date I cannot order my downloads by month for example and what is sad is when copied on another partition I usualy lose this creation date ... and only stay this modification date that means nothing, so I have both displayed on Nemo

[Cosmo.]

I also show both, but the fine thing is, that every user can set it up to his/her liking.

What is the oldest file from January 21?

[palladio]

.

.. when copied on another partition I usualy lose this creation date

cp -p preserves timestamps.

[Menard]

I am not really terminal compatible, especially when you must use some complex path to files, files with names containing spaces etc on NTFS partitions, and for what I tried with cp or mv I didn't really work

Look at this https://unix.stackexchange.com/question ... 897#657897

[Menard]

I also show both, but the fine thing is, that every user can set it up to his/her liking.

What is the oldest file from January 21?

There are 10 files with the date 20210104 23:09:06 all are on the root of personal folder of my present session, but it doesn't searched on the primary admin account, these are system files as .bash_logout .bashrc .gtkrc-2.0

[Cosmo.]

Is the primary admin account the account, which got created during the system's installation? You didn't tell that. Of course you have to look there. Your present account can only tell something about it's creation time, not of the relative past.

[Menard]

Yes, I explored the primary account but found nothing there, the oldest, some folders are tagged 2018 (libreoffice) some applications 2003 ... (I began with Linux in 2017) for the system part of the home the oldest is april 4 or july 4 2021
In fact I don't remember really what I did in early january, 2021, because generally the installation was simple, with the home automatically transfered, but I also moved the home from one place to another in early august 2021, no date seems to appear related to this date ... and clearly I don't find some dates clearly related to the past of this home partition before the installation of LM 20.0 as if this installation had reset all dates on my home ...

NB : I never used some restoration as Timeshift or Clonezilla on my home

[Cosmo.]

Yes, I explored the primary account but found nothing there, the oldest, some folders are tagged 2018 (libreoffice) some applications 2003

Modification date: might be, creation date: impossible.

[Menard]

yes, 2003 and 2018 are modification dates,
January 4, 2021 are also modification dates, July 4, 2021 are creation dates

On July 4 I only restored a Timeshift snapshot (only the root) that was created on July 1st

[LittleScriptMan]

In Terminal :

Code: Select all

find ~/ -type d -printf '%T+ %p\n' | sort | head -n 1

will return creation date + hour and name of the oldest directory in your current home folder.
I won't discuss further the command line because it seems not being your cup of tea.

PS : just changing the last number (1 here) in 2, 3, 5... will return the 2, 3, 5... older dirs.

[Menard]

Yes but it returns a date, so, that is not really interesting because it is from 2018, an application, Unigine Valley I had from the begining but I copy its folder from home to home, so I don't know