Linux – Check to see if file date created and modified were modified

As mentioned in Ignacio's answer, email only contains the contents of the file. But archives are different. This is the result of unzip -ql asd.zip (which lists the file contents).

  Length      Date    Time    Name
---------  ---------- -----   ----
       23  2011-07-12 14:10   asd.txt
---------                     -------
       23                     1 file

The time I guess matches with the modified date.

Get the creation time of the file use stat command. The output will be in seconds (since unix epoch).

• -n option suppresses the newline at end of output.

• -f permits use of "printf" formatting. %B is the creation or "birth" date of the file.

  D=$(stat -nf'%B' your_file)
  

Then use date -r option to input date in seconds. The +%Y... aargument specifies the date format.

   DF=$(date -r $D '+%Y%m%d_%H%M')

The bash scripting would be something like this-:

 export PREFIX="your_prefix"
 D=$(stat -nf'%B' your_file)            # seconds since creation time of file
 DF=$(date -r $D '+%Y%m%d_%H%M')             # formatted creation date/time
 mv your_file "${PREFIX}_your_file_${DF}.txt"  # rename the file