A statx(2) Linux system Python wrapper

At my previous job, I needed to access the birth time attribute of a file on Linux. If I am not mistaken, the standard library doesn't support getting it on Linux (st_birthtime - time of file creation is supported on other unix systems, such as freebsd, see: https://docs.python.org/2/library/os.html#os.stat). So, I created this wrapper for getting the file status (birth time, etc.) using the statx(2) linux system call.

There are other more portable way to do OS wrapper, and maybe faster (but it's not an issue).

Just write the wrapper as a C extension module, and in the module make the system call with proper library call.

like in the following code:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/samples/vfs/te...

This way it will be portable!

A couple of weeks ago, I just made for our OS's system calls. It's only a first draft, but works fine.

You could also parse the C header for constant values.

(Actually, I wrote a python script to generate the C extension for the system calls also, not just for the constants)

[Shameless Plug] A blog post I wrote about file creation time in Linux: https://www.anmolsarma.in/post/linux-file-creation-time/

I'm positive I've done this before with the built-in os module

Neat, though the if/then tree to get the syscall number is a bit clunky and only works on x86, x64, and ARM. I get that options are limited, but it might be nice to make that list more complete.

No test suite. Also no error handling.

I think it's a bit too early to show this to HN…

I don't really understand what this is doing here. It definitely does not pique the hacker interest. This is just a simple syscall wrapper. The most interesting thing about it is that it somehow got upvoted 14 times.

Maybe it's just general ignorance of the statx syscall's existence or utility on Linux?

https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/statx.2.html

It's just stat but it accepts a mask for what info you want and returns a couple of extra fields.