Get the creation timestamp of a file using Paramiko SFTP

Question content

Do you know if there is actually a way to get "ctime" (the timestamp of file creation) from an sftp server? Using paramiko for sftp, I only see "atime" and "mtime". However, I'm trying to access the file's original creation timestamp (not "atime").

Here is the current code I built but commented out the part about the file creation timestamp as it would cause an error:

for file in tqdm(sftp.listdir()):
    # Debug check:
    print('We are now in the try loop:')
    
    # Look for files that have the same starting 25 characters as the column
    # in the mapper file:
    mask = mapper.file_name_startswith.str[:25].str.contains(file[:25])
    
    # Grab the destination path info from the mapper file:
    dest_path = mapper[mask]['destination_path'].values[0]

    # Get the timestamp of the original file before we remove it, for both modified & created:
    remote_mod_time = sftp.stat(file).st_mtime 
    # Need to use a different method to get the created date:
    '''
    remote_file_attrs = sftp.listdir_attr('.')  
    for attr in remote_file_attrs:  
        if attr.filename == file:  
            remote_create_time = attr.st_ctime  
            break  
    '''       
    # Move the current file to our desired local (destination) path:
    local_path = os.path.join(dest_path, file)
    sftp.get(file, local_path)

    # Set the modified date timestamp of the downloaded file to match the timestamp of the original     file:  
    os.utime(local_path, (remote_mod_time, remote_mod_time)) 

    # Set the created date (cannot use os.utime for this) to match the timestamp of the original file:
    #date_time = pywintypes.Time(remote_create_time)  
    #win32file.SetFileTime(local_path, date_time, None, None)  
    
    # Remove the current file, which is being processed, from the sftp server:
    #sftp.remove(file)
    
    # Append the file to the "done_file" list:
    done_files.append(file)

Correct answer

File creation time is only supported starting with SFTP version 4. Most SFTP servers (especially OpenSSH) only support SFTP version 3. The same goes for Paramiko (on the client side).

So in most cases (even if you patch Paramiko to support SFTP 4) you will not be able to retrieve the creation time from the SFTP server.

If you have shell access to the server, you may be able to retrieve the creation time using shell commands. But this is no longer an SFTP issue.

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