Question

Is there a way to know or get the original create/modified timestamps?

Answer 1

I believe that the only timestamps recorded in the Git database are the author and commit timestamps. I don’t see an option for Git to modify the file’s timestamp to match the most recent commit, and it makes sense that this wouldn’t be the default behavior (because if it were, Makefiles wouldn’t work correctly).

You could write a script to set the modification date of your files to the the time of the most recent commit. It might look something like this:

# No arguments? Recursively list all git-controlled files in $PWD and start over
if [ $# = 0 ]; then
  git ls-files -z |xargs -0 sh "$0"
  exit $?
fi

for file in "$@"; do
  time="$(git log --pretty=format:%cd -n 1 \
                  --date=format:%Y%m%d%H%M.%S --date-order -- "$file")"
  if [ -z "$time" ]; then
    echo "ERROR: skipping '$file' -- no git log found" >&2
    continue
  fi
  touch -m -t "$time" "$file"
done

This accepts specific files as arguments or else updates each git-controlled file in the current directory or its children. This is done in a manner that permits spaces and even line breaks in filenames since git ls-files -z outputs a null-terminated file list and xargs -0 parses null-terminated lists into arguments.

This will take a while if you have a lot of files.