How use Java FileChannel to copy preserving timestamps

Question

How use Java FileChannel to copy preserving timestamps for files and directories? Looks like the files are not preserving timestamps while copying to another location. How is that possible using FileChannel in Java?

Answer 1

You can not do it by FileChannel, you can use apache commons io :

IOUtils.copy(new FileInputStream(file), new FileOutputStream(file2));
// copy file and preserve the time stamp. the sourceFile and destFile are of type java.io.File
FileUtils.copyFile(sourceFile,destFile);

Reference : http://www.studytrails.com/java-io/file-copying-and-moving-deleting.jsp

Answer 2

This is not the role of FileChannel. A FileChannel is just a wrapper over a byte channel.

What you want instead is to use the "new" Java 7 file API for that. If you want to copy a file to a location while preserving attributes you can do it:

Files.copy(src, dst, StandardCopyOption.COPY_ATTRIBUTES);