When was my file modified In Linux it depends 16800

I can tell that you are a technical person-user. In all fairness the person(s) who devised the time-date stamp were also techies so they most likely saw things the same way. But as a user, the notion that "Windows shortcuts are files as well" is something that is most likely foreign to them. To them it's only a 'shortcut' - they know nothing as to how this is actually implemented.

This is the key point I'm trying to make. A techie views file creation time-date as something that happens at the file-system level. Non-technical users don't necessarily think in those terms. To my wife the computer contains things like "her resume" and "her music." She tends to view these things as documents and content rather than block sector data that is written to sectors on physical disk #1.

This is actually the tip of the ice-berg. I once worked on an app that would synchronize directories across computers. We used the filesystem change notifications to decide what files were changed and what needed to be synched. The Office apps do some very, very strange things in how they handle files.