As to formatting, read the perlform man page.

As to times on directories, this is one of the minor pieces of Unix arcana.

There are three times associated with every Unix file (or directory, since directories are actually files, too). There's the ctime, mtime, and atime. atime is access time. It's the last time that someone looked at the data in the file. mtime is the modification time. It's the last time someone changed the data in the file. ctime is change time, not! creation time. It's the time that the file's metadata was changed. This is stuff like file creation, obviously, chown, chmod, etc. That last one trips people up. There's no dedicated creation timestamp in Unix.

But then you have to understand how directories are modified. When a new file is placed in a directory or is removed, all of the directory's times change. If any of a file's times change, the directory's atime changes. I think that's it.

I don't know exactly which time you're looking for.