Can bash read the "Date Added" of a file/directory?

Question

With programs like stat you see access, modify and change, but with Finder on macOS there is a "Date Added" field. Can I get the "Date Added" for a file or directory displayed in the Terminal, like stat can display the Modify date?

Answer 1

Some candidates include the following. File times are exposed in metadata, and mdls is "metadata list". When used with the -raw option, output from mdls contains fields separated with an NUL character. e.g. as follows.

# The creation date which should not change.
mdls -raw -name kMDItemFSCreationDate $filename

The stat command behaves differently. Results from four versions of two shells using the command, stat -f $filename, follow.

1. /usr/local/bin/zsh(5.7.1 via Homebrew) produces stat: missing file descriptor.
2. /usr/local/bin/bash (5.0.2(1) via Homebrew) produces testing.txt.
3. /bin/zsh (5.3 included with macOS) produces stat: missing file descriptor.
4. /bin/bash (3.2.57(1) include with macOS produces testing.txt.

However, by using the full path to stat, the command completes as expected in each version of both shells. An example that produces all times found with stat follows.

/usr/bin/stat -f "Access (atime): %Sa%nModify (mtime): %Sm%nChange (ctime): %Sc%nBirth  (Btime): %SB" testing.txt

The command produces output such as the following result from the command above.

Access (atime): Feb 21 10:46:41 2019
Modify (mtime): Feb 21 10:46:21 2019
Change (ctime): Feb 21 10:46:21 2019
Birth  (Btime): Feb 21 10:22:17 2019

This was an interesting question, and I hope to receive more insight on the cause of the disparity.