Get the mtime of a symlink and not its target in Python

Question

In Python (and Python2) on macOS, when I use

os.path.getmtime('/path/to/a/symlink')

I get the modification time of the symlink's target. - How do I get instead the modification time of the symlink itself?

Answer 1

As @LeiYang hinted in a comment, use os.lstat instead.

However, the result is not an mtime float, but rather a stat_result structure.

How to extract the mtime information see stat — Interpreting stat() results in the Python documentation.