Olivier Certner <o...@freebsd.org> wrote: > Both the examples above prompt some straight objections on the current > usefulness of "atime". First, unless you've disabled building the locate > database in cron (enabled by default, on a weekly basis), access times on > directories lose most of their usefulness. Second, if using an IDS, I'm > afraid it's just game over. And even if you think you are not, > '460.pkg-checksum' at least is readily there to much complicate, or even > prevent you from, getting package usage information this way (it is enabled > by default, and on a daily basis).
I've often wished there was the ability to set a process to "noatime" - where all accesses to the filesytem by the process and its children don't alter atime. It would be handy for those cases you describe above, such as backups and locate, but these days, where it matters, and is suitable, I instead create a filesystem snapshot, and run the process on that instead. (which is how "live" backups should be done anyway!) Cheers, Jamie
