Java class library to get/set file and directory times: Create/LastModified/LastAccessed. For Windows only.
Create time is when the file was first written. Modified time (sometimes called lastModified) is when the file was last written. Accessed time is when the file was last read or written.

Checking its date, looking at its attributes or checking to see if it exists does not count as reading it.  Get/Set Windows File Times Create/LastAccessed/LastModified with a JNI native code class.  Java and JNI you include in your own code.  

You can test with    C:   CD com.mindprod.filetimes   java com.mindprod.filetimes.FileTimes  and ensuring nativefiletimes.dll is on the path, e.g. in the current directory.  In JDK 1.5+ the DLL may be in the jar, so long is it has no package path name.  See FileTimes.java for the API to use these methods in your own programs. FileTimes does nothing by itself, other than a debugging test harness to demonstrate the methods.  Windows keeps file timestamps accurate to 100 nanoseconds with 10,000 times as much precision as Java's 1 ms.  This means if you copy a file in Java, the new file will not have the exact same timestamp as the old. This package retrieves and sets timestamps accurate only to the millisecond.