I'd like to offer my thoughts on ctime verses mtime. Sorry, but this will be a little verbose. First, if you change the contents of a file you change the mtime of a file. Since this is a change to the inode, ctime is updated as well. The mtime is bit like the date on a letter and ctime is a bit like the postmark on the envelope. You can set mtime to anything you want via the utime() system call or the touch command. Doing so sets the ctime and you cannot reset ctime. If you restored last year's payroll records from tape, you might want to set the mtime back to the end of last year. But the ctime will reliably still indicate when the last change to the file occurred. This is how your backup program will know that it must back up the file. The ctime is really used by backup program. But an application program that prints out a payroll listing would use mtime.

ctime refers to changes made to the file's inode (such as changing permissions, etc). mtime refers to changes to the data within the file. So cnewer will use a reference files inode change time for the comparision, whereas newer will use a reference files data modification time.