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Can I find the creation/last modified date of an html file? For example, I would like to know when some index.html file from some website was created, not when I downloaded it.

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  • For static HTML pages backed by files, the Last-Modified header in the HTTP response usually reflects the last modification time.
    – Stéphane Chazelas
    Jun 8, 2015 at 16:48
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    For UNIX/Linux creation date is not part of the file definition
    – Romeo Ninov
    Jun 8, 2015 at 17:11

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Most browsers don't do anything special to set the time stamp on a downloaded file, so the file ends up being dated from the download. Download managers usually change the downloaded file's modification time to match the Last-Modified header sent by the server. With command line tools, use wget or curl -R to set the file's modification time to the time sent by the server (and wget --no-use-server-timestamps or curl to set it to the download time).

The server will generally set the Last-Modified header to the time the file was last modified, if the content of the URL is stored as a file. In these days of dynamically-generated content, that's not so common anymore. There's no way to get the creation date; most filesystems don't even record it.

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