Date: Thu, 25 May 2000 02:32:35 -0700 From: Don Lewis <Don.Lewis@tsc.tdk.com> To: Arun Sharma <adsharma@sharmas.dhs.org>, Peter Jeremy <peter.jeremy@alcatel.com.au> Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: file creation times ? Message-ID: <200005250932.CAA20546@salsa.gv.tsc.tdk.com> In-Reply-To: <20000524185859.A19573@sharmas.dhs.org> References: <00May25.110340est.115250@border.alcanet.com.au> <20000524185859.A19573@sharmas.dhs.org>
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On May 24, 6:58pm, Arun Sharma wrote: } Subject: Re: file creation times ? } On Thu, May 25, 2000 at 11:03:38AM +1000, Peter Jeremy wrote: } > To put it another way, why _should_ FreeBSD store a file creation time? } } 0. I'm tired of seeing people putting "Created: mm/dd/yy" in their documents. When saving a document to "file", many editors will do the equivalent of save document to "file.new" ln "file" "file.bak" mv "file.new" "file" in order to minimize the possibility of losing the document if the editor or the system crashes at just the wrong time. The result of this would be to set the file creation time to the time it was last saved. This won't be very helpful if you are relying on the file creation time to tell you when the *document* was first created. NFS doesn't support this file timestamp, so you lose if the file is stored on another server. The tar archive format doesn't support this timestamp, so a document that is archived using tar and later restored will lose its notion of when it was created. What should the semantics of the creation time be across a backup and restore? Should the original creation time be restored, or should the creation time be the time when the restored copy of the file is written? What about just copying a file? If I make an exact copy of a document, should the two copies have the same or differing creation times? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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