I installed the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 on a client system today. If it is of any concern, it's running on the bare metal. After the installation was completed,  I did ls -ltr / and it showed a complete list along with dates of files and folders. To my surprise, the dates mentioned there are some time in the past, way before I started the installation.Can someone clarify on what's going on here?
Why are the timestamps on files so old on my newly installed system?
files;rhel;date
Files managed by your package management are put there by extracting these packages. Effectively, these packages are just archives (cpio format for RPM, ar for DEBs). By extracting these files, the modification date is preserved, just as would happen when you create a ZIP file and extract them on a later time.The date you're seeing is the time the packages were built, would be my best guess.On Fedora most basic filesystem directories like /bin are provided by the filesystem package apparently:# yum whatprovides /binfilesystem-3.1-2.fc18.x86_64 : The basic directory layout for a Linux systemThis is probably also valid for CentOS/RHEL, but I have no access to such a machine to actually verify that.On Debian/Ubuntu this leads to numerous packages - directories can be in multiple packages there. I guess it will then depend on the package that first created it. The order of which packages were installed are managed by the installer you run.