As stated above, file time is operating-system dependent. As of this writing, two formats are used. For unix and Windows systems, file time is the number of seconds since midnight January 1, 1970 UTC (the standard unix time convention).
OS/2 represents file time as a 32-bit unsigned integer, in which the time components are broken down into unsigned bit fields. The components are always stated in local time. The fields, from MSB to LSB, are:
The following procedures generate their results in file-time format:
file-access-time
file-access-time-direct
file-access-time-indirect
file-modification-time
file-modification-time-direct
file-modification-time-indirect
file-attributes/access-time
file-attributes/modification-time
file-attributes/change-time
Additionally, set-file-times! accepts its time arguments in
file-time format.