Re: determine when user account created?

From: Dave Uhring (daveuhring_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 10/27/04 

Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 11:40:40 -0500

On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 17:02:28 +0100, Tony Walton wrote:

> Dave Uhring wrote:

>> The OS was installed at about 19:42 on 23 August - from the symlink for
>> /etc/chroot.
>>
>> The user account was created at about 21:17 on the same day - from the
>> symlink in my user's home directory.
>>
>
> The symlink was created at about 21:17 on the same day, sure. How do you
> know it wasn't deleted at 21:14 and re-created three minutes later? All
> you're looking at there is the creation date/time of a symlink.

I agree that UFS does not easily provide creation time, if at all. But I
do know that the symlink in the user's home directory was created within a
couple of minutes after running useradd. How much precision is necessary
to provide an answer to the OP's question?

> Same goes for the /etc/chroot symlink. You're assuming that those
> creation dates and times are reliable
>
> # ls -l /etc/chroot
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root other 17 Oct 27 17:00 /etc/chroot ->
> ../usr/bin/chroot
>
> This OS was installed a *lot* more than a minute ago (I was there!)

I suppose that one could delete and create a new symlink or even that a
patch could do that. But it's unlikely that all those symlinks in /etc
would be so affected unless done deliberately.

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