C# Program to View the Access Date and Time of a File

Given a file, our task is to view the date and time of access to a file. So to do this we use the following properties of the FileSystemInfo class:

1. CreationTime: This property is used to get the time in which the file is created.

Syntax:

file.CreationTime 

Where the file is the path of the file and it will return DateTime. A DateTime structure is set to the date and time that the specified file.

2. LastAccessTime: This property is used to get the time in which the file is lastly used/accessed.

Syntax:

file.LastAccessTime

It will return a DateTime which represents the time in which the current file was accessed. 

3. LastWriteTime: This property is used to get the time in which the file or directory is lastly written/updated.

Syntax:

file.LastWriteTime

It will return a DateTime which represents the time in the current file that was last written.

Approach

1. Read the file by using the file path i.e., C://sravan//data.txt

2. Declare DateTime variable for accessing file time details using the CreationTime property.

DateTime createdtime = path.CreationTime

3. Get the file last access time using the LastAccessTime property.

createdtime = path.LastAccessTime

4. Get the file lastly written time using the LastWriteTime property.

createdtime = path.LastWriteTime

Example:

In this example, we are going to create a file in C drive with two lines of data and the file name is data.txt and the path is shown in the below image:

// C# Program to display the date 
// and time of access of a file 
using System;
using System.IO;

class GFG{
    
static void Main()
{
    
    // Choose the file using file path
    FileInfo path = new FileInfo("C://sravan//data.txt");
    
    // Declare time variable using DateTime function 
    // This variable holds the time of the file in 
    // which it is created
    DateTime createdtime = path.CreationTime;
    
    // Get the file created time
    Console.WriteLine("File is created at: {0}", createdtime);
    
    // Get the file lastly accessed time
    createdtime = path.LastAccessTime;
    Console.WriteLine("File is accessed at lastly: {0}", createdtime);
    
    // Get the file lastly updated/written time
    createdtime = path.LastWriteTime;
    Console.WriteLine("File is lastly written on: {0} ", createdtime);

}
}

Output:

File is created at: 10/23/2021 10:02:10 AM
File is accessed at lastly: 10/23/2021 10:20:00 AM
File is lastly written on: 10/23/2021 10:17:03 AM