How to change "inode change time" of a file?

Question

I tried to use

touch -d "2011-09-15 16:50" test.txt

but it just modifies the last access time and the last modified time.

Access: 2011-09-15 16:50:00.000000000 +0700
Modify: 2011-09-15 16:50:00.000000000 +0700 
Change: 2011-11-15 16:56:55.620124149 +0700

How to change the last change time?

I want to do this because my crontab uses filectime($file) to get the last changed time and I need to create a file of two months ago to test something.

Solution

There is no general command to do this. However, depending on the filesystem and your administrator privileges, you can do it.

Here is an answer for the case of ext2/3 and possibly ext4.

Comments

[psusi]

Your crontab should almost certainly be using mtime instead of ctime, or a combination of the two.

[Johnny1am]

Yep, this is an exact dup of stackoverflow.com/questions/4537291/… . Is it possible to mark duplicate questions across stackexchange sites?