Windows 7, file properties, date modified, how do you show seconds?

I've been looking at the same problem and as far as I can tell, no there isn't a way.

However, I've been using a workaround that has satisified what I needed it for so hopefully it will help you. The following command, when run from a command line in the directory in question, will print out the file names and the modified date down to seconds:

forfiles /c "cmd /c echo @file @ftime"

I hope that might be of some use to people.

You can view the file creation/modification time quickly in PowerShell:

PS C:\Users\mskfisher> $file = C:\windows\notepad.exe
PS C:\Users\mskfisher> $file = Get-Item C:\windows\notepad.exe
PS C:\Users\mskfisher> $file.CreationTime

Monday, July 13, 2009 6:56:36 PM


PS C:\Users\mskfisher> $file.LastAccessTime

Monday, July 13, 2009 6:56:36 PM


PS C:\Users\mskfisher> $file.LastWriteTime

Monday, July 13, 2009 8:39:25 PM

Inspired by a TechNet blog post using PowerShell for some other crazy tricks.

It's important to note that Windows does show seconds. The hiding of seconds only happens in the main Explorer window:

But Andrew wasn't asking about the main Explorer window, he was asking about the the Right-click -> Properties dialog, which does show seconds:

If it works on Properties, why not in the main window?

The reason you don't see seconds, is that it was a usability decision to remove them (99% of users don't care about the second a file was last modified).

To accomplish this, the shell team is calling GetTimeFormatEx, using the flag asking for it to remove seconds:

GetTimeFormatEx(..., TIME_NOSECONDS, ...);

which returns the Short time format::

with any seconds (ss)¹ stripped out.

¹Even though the default en-US locale does not specify ss in the Short time format; TIME_NOSECONDS will remove any ss even if there was. _{Nor would i obey that command even if you were.}

Edit: If you want to see the time a file was modified (down to the second), then use the Windows GUI. It shows you the time a file was modified (down to the second):

If you don't want to use the Windows GUI to see the time a file was modified (down to the second), then don't use it.

Edit 3/26/2015: The Windows UI will always show the modified time down to the second - even if the file has been modified very recently:

Edit 1/28/2016: Included Windows 10 screenshot to show that Windows 10, like Windows 7, 8, and 8.1, do show seconds.

According to Microsoft Answers: (Archived, Jan. 2010)

Unfortunately we don’t know why this was removed; it’s on the developers’ side of things and out of our realm of “in-the-know”.

As you specified Chrome (and Firefox) will display seconds.

I just loaded XP pro in vmware, and saw the default for XP is sans seconds. Then I checked GNU ls on both Linux and Cygwin, no seconds displayed (by default). Granted you can do ls -l --time-style=full-iso to get the granularity you need. I guess I never really thought of needing that level of detail.