Re: [SLE] preserving files' creation time
- From: Jerry Feldman <gaf@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2006 10:51:53 -0500
I'm not sure if I can provide the answer directly, but a Linux (and Unix)
file contains 3 different time values:
1. ctime: The time the file's inode was last modified. This can happen if
you make a change that affects the size of the file. Note that if you
create an additional hard link to a file, ctime will change. In the case of
the ln command, ctime and atime will change but not mtime.
2. mtime: The time the file's contents were last modified. See my comment
above.
3. atime: The time the file was last accessed (such as read).
Note that in Linux and Unix, a file is an entry in the Inode table that
contains information about a file. The file directories simply contain file
names that point to the inode. This is one feature that makes Unix and
Linux different from most other operating systems. You can (and do) have
files that have different names. For instance, every directory has at last
2 names:
1. The actual name of the directory, such as /usr
2. Dot (.). This is a hard link to the current directory.
3. DotDot (..). This is a hard link to a parent directory.
For instance:
/usr contains a number of subdirectories, each having a (..) pointing (as a
hard link) to the /usr directory. On my system, /usr has 13 hard links (or
13 different names such as /usr, ., /usr/bin/.., etc.
(also note that hard links cannot span file systems, but symbolic links can
since a symbolic link is a file containing a name of the file it refers
to).
It is also possible for a file to exist without a name. This can occur in
the case where you delete a file that is in use. Since the rm(1) command
does not physically delete a file, the open file remains until the program
that has it opened closes it. This occurs often if you try to regain space
by deleting a large log file, but the daemon using it is still running.
--
Jerry Feldman <gaf@xxxxxxx>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9
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