Time stamp

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Term used to describe a time that is printed to a file or other location to help keep track of when data is added, removed, sent, received, etc. Below are some examples of how a time stamp may be used and where.

Time stamps (or timestamps) are typically used for logging events or in a sequence of events (SOE), in which case each event in the log or SOE is marked with a timestamp. In filesystems, timestamp may mean the stored date/time of creation or modification of a file.

In the example below, the time and date stamp are of when that particular news article was posted. Many web pages that have several updates a day will post a time or date stamp to let users know when something was posted:

Net Attack Aimed at Banking Data
Submitted Friday, July 02, 2004 @ 08:11 AM

In the example below, you can see that MS-DOS, like every other operating system, has a time stamp and date stamp of when the file was last modified:

06/21/1998 09:35p 6,815 ch.gif

Date stamp: similar to the time stamp, the date stamp is the date printed to file or other location.