Carlos E. R. wrote: > > The Monday 2007-04-23 at 18:44 -0700, Randall R Schulz wrote: > > >> I often use the modification date, sometimes the creation date, but I > >> have never needed to use the access time. And as for dirs, simply by > >> listing a dir that time is modified. > > So be it. > > > But if you need to find files knowing that you read them at a time > > certain (or approximate), then the Unix "access time" is what you need. > > Maybe... but then, some times I grep on all my home dir, so they all > would > have the same date. Now, there is beagle, that I suppose does some of > that as well. Then, I restored a full backup after a disaster last > February, so all that time info years old would have been deleted > anyway... I mean, none of those stamps show real access dates. Not when > "I" accessed them, anyway. > > I enabled noatime (ie, disable that timestamp) around two years ago, I > think, but I forgot nodiratime: I'm activating that now, too. I prefer > disk speed over that small info I don't use. I might use it, but... > haven't found a good use for it yet, so off it goes :-) > BTW Tend to use touch for modifying timestamps (not grep).
Depending on the backup tool you are using you can retain the original time stamp of the files. Since my tape unit started playing up after the upgraded (long story with some very peculiar file system behaviour involved) I have been working on revising my backup procedures. Originally considered using time stamps to identify changed files, but initial tests with tar and kdar gave somewhat undesirable (and inconsistent) results. A little further investigation show that creation time, access time and modification seem to be effectively set inconsistently by different applications, so as a guide for bulk processing time stamps have limited use. e.g. many of the editors seem to backup the original file and and create a working copy which means access time == modification time == creation time on the apparent original whether a change has been made or not. So making such a change on a data directory structure would apparently not cause too many issues, but it may break the functionality of any software relies on time stamping to backup files. However, I would not deactivate time stamping on the part of the file system holding /var/spool/cron as time stamping is used by the run-cron script to establish when to fire the certain cron scripts.... There may be other application using file time stamping to control activity. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
