On an ext4 filesystem, I got a file born 30 seconds after its actual creation. Is this a bug?
I know that such issues can be observed with NFS, but here this is just a local ext4 filesystem. Here are the details. I started a shell script: cventin:~> ps -p 667828 -o lstart,cmd STARTED CMD Tue Apr 26 14:43:15 2022 /bin/sh /home/vlefevre/wd/mpfr/tests/mpfrtests.sh This script creates a file mpfrtests.cventin.lip.ens-lyon.fr.out very early. But the first attempts to look at this file failed: cventin:~/software/mpfr> tail -n 30 mpfrtests.*.out; ll mpfrtests.*.out zsh: no match zsh: no match cventin:~/software/mpfr[1]> tail -n 30 mpfrtests.*.out; ll mpfrtests.*.out zsh: no match zsh: no match cventin:~/software/mpfr[1]> lt|head <14:43:42 total 7016 -rw-r--r-- 1 188644 2022-04-26 14:43:42 config.log -rw-r--r-- 1 2861 2022-04-26 14:43:42 conftest.c -rw-r--r-- 1 0 2022-04-26 14:43:42 conftest.err -rw-r--r-- 1 1907 2022-04-26 14:43:42 confdefs.h -rwxr-xr-x 1 632161 2022-04-26 14:43:16 configure.lineno* drwxr-xr-x 2 4096 2022-04-26 14:43:11 doc/ drwxr-xr-x 3 4096 2022-04-26 14:43:11 tune/ -rwxr-xr-x 1 23568 2022-04-26 14:43:11 depcomp* drwxr-xr-x 5 36864 2022-04-26 14:43:11 tests/ cventin:~/software/mpfr> lt|head <14:43:47 total 6416 -rw-r--r-- 1 19436 2022-04-26 14:43:47 config.log -rw-r--r-- 1 561 2022-04-26 14:43:47 conftest.c -rw-r--r-- 1 0 2022-04-26 14:43:47 conftest.err -rw-r--r-- 1 4138 2022-04-26 14:43:47 mpfrtests.cfgout -rw-r--r-- 1 500 2022-04-26 14:43:47 confdefs.h -rwxr-xr-x 1 632161 2022-04-26 14:43:45 configure.lineno* -rw-r--r-- 1 878 2022-04-26 14:43:45 mpfrtests.cventin.lip.ens-lyon.fr.out drwxr-xr-x 3 4096 2022-04-26 14:43:44 tune/ drwxr-xr-x 4 36864 2022-04-26 14:43:44 tests/ According to /usr/bin/stat, the file birth is Birth: 2022-04-26 14:43:45.537241731 +0200 thus 30 seconds after the script started! Note that the configure.lineno file is created *after* mpfrtests.cventin.lip.ens-lyon.fr.out, and one can see that at 14:43:16, configure.lineno was already created. This is a 12-core Debian/unstable machine with Linux cventin 5.17.0-1-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT Debian 5.17.3-1 (2022-04-18) x86_64 GNU/Linux -- Vincent Lefèvre <vinc...@vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)