Mtime

Time of last modification of a file (e.g. the data in the file has changed). The information is taken from the inode.

$ stat -s $file | tr ' ' '\n' | grep mtime st_mtime=1130490970 $ date -r 1130490970 Fri Oct 28 11:16:10 CEST 2005 $ ls -lT $file -rw-r--r-- 1 root  wheel  33554432 Oct 28 11:16:10 2005 file

If a file has been modified the mtime will change to that date. The mtime can be changed in a file:

Thu Jan 1 01:00:00 CET 1970 -rw-r--r-- 1 root  wheel  33554432 Jan  1 01:00:01 1970 file
 * 1) date -r 0
 * 1) touch -mt 197001010100.01 $file
 * 2) ls -lT $file

When a files mtime is changed the ctime will update naturally to the date when this happened.