How Can I Efficiently Access a File\'s Creation Date in Windows Using Go?

Accessing File Creation Date in Windows with Go

Question:

Finding file metadata, such as creation date, can be useful for various scenarios. In Windows, how can we efficiently access file creation information using Go's standard library?

Answer:

Go's standard library provides interfaces to delve into system-specific file attributes. However, the commonly used os.Stat() and os.Chtimes() functions do not directly提供creation date information.

To access the creation date in Windows, we need to utilize the FileInfo.Sys() method. This method returns the system-specific data structures, which for Windows is the syscall.Win32FileAttributeData structure.

The Win32FileAttributeData structure contains various attributes, including:

• FileAttributes: File attributes such as read-only, hidden, etc.
• CreationTime: Nanosecond timestamp of file creation
• LastAccessTime: Nanosecond timestamp of last file access
• LastWriteTime: Nanosecond timestamp of last file write
• FileSizeHigh: High 32 bits of file size
• FileSizeLow: Low 32 bits of file size

To retrieve the creation time specifically, we can convert the Nanosecond timestamp stored in the CreationTime field into a time.Time object:

d := fi.Sys().(*syscall.Win32FileAttributeData)
cTime := time.Unix(0, d.CreationTime.Nanoseconds())

It's important to note that since this functionality is Windows-specific, it should be protected by build constraints to avoid cross-platform issues. This can be done using a _windows.go file or the //go:build windows directive.

The above is the detailed content of How Can I Efficiently Access a File\'s Creation Date in Windows Using Go?. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!