This function may not be that generally useful. I write security software and it helps give the software hints if I can adjust the dates on the symbolic links. That way I don't have 2 minute cron jobs running every hour.
If I wrote an ltouch would it be useful enough to include in the source or should I just drop it only sourceforge? I guess I'd have to convince ppl to accept the kernel patches as well, but that's probably do-able. Jason [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Fri, 1 Mar 2002, Bob Proulx wrote: > > > This really isn't a bug, but it looks like there isn't a way to touch a > > symbolic link. > > That is generally true of BSD like systems which implement symbolic > links. Actions upon symlinks pass through the symlink and act upon > the target of the symlink. > > > If you do a > > > > ln -s foo.tgz foo > > touch foo > > > > it update the date on foo.tgz. > > Not of which I am aware. File times are changed by the utimes(2) > system call. I know of no lutimes(2) call. Perhaps others will have > different information. > > In order to act upon the symlink special kernel routines need to be > added such as lstat(2) [as opposed to stat(2)] which act upon the > symlink itself. Fortunately the ower, group, and mode of a symlink > are completely irrelevant to a symlink. > > For what purpose would one desire to change the time of a symink? > > > Is there a work around? > > The only way I know to do this on BSD like systems is to remove and > recreate the symlink. > > [I am hoping and assuming that you won't but if you actually did that > I would create one off to the side as a temporarily named object and > then 'mv' it into place since rename(2) is an atomic operation. That > way the symlink will always exist. Otherwise there will be a time, > although small, where the symlink will appear not to exist to other > programs and a race condition will be created. If you cared.] > > Bob > _______________________________________________ Bug-fileutils mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-fileutils
