Retrieving the creation date of a file and displaying it should be a simple task. Yeah, right. The Java documentation has page after page regarding time and dates.

Some examples on the web suggest using:

String timeStamp = attr.creationTime().toString();

This returns a date string in Zulu time such as: 2009-02-13T23:31:30.123Z

Attempting to reformat this to reflect the time zone is a pain. Removing the ‘T’, the ‘Z’, and the fractional seconds and using the following will still fail to adjust for the time zone:

Date date = simpleDateFormat.parse(timeStamp, new ParsePosition(0));
timeStamp = simpleDateFormat.format(date);

A simpler solution is:

//-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
// ViewerReporter::getFileCreationDateTimeString
//
// Returns the file creation timestamp for pFilename as a formatted String.
//
// On Linux systems, this returns the last modified date.
//

private String getFileCreationDateTimeString(String pFilename)
{

    Path path = Paths.get(pFilename);

    BasicFileAttributes attr;

    try{
        attr = Files.readAttributes(path, BasicFileAttributes.class);
    }catch (IOException e){
        return("");
    }

    Date date = new Date(attr.creationTime().toMillis());

    SimpleDateFormat simpleDateFormat =
                                   new SimpleDateFormat("MM-dd-yyyy HH:mm:ss");

    String timeStamp = simpleDateFormat.format(date);

    return(timeStamp);

}//end of ViewerReporter::getFileCreationDateTimeString
//-----------------------------------------------------------------------------