Date: Thu, 25 May 2000 17:57:33 +0200 From: Christoph Sold <so@server.i-clue.de> To: Brian McGovern <bmcgover@cisco.com> Cc: adsharma@sharmas.dhs.org, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: file creation times? Message-ID: <392D4D6D.68986105@i-clue.de> References: <200005251531.LAA48025@bmcgover-pc.cisco.com>
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Brian McGovern wrote: > > 0. I'm tired of seeing people putting "Created: mm/dd/yy" in their docuemnts. > > Ok, so stop them. > > > 1. NTFS does it. It's a part of SMB. I suspect that Samba just uses the > > last modified time. > > Just because NTFS does it, doesn't mean its right, or even valid. See below. If FFS does it not, it does nto mean it's invalid. > > 2. The average computer user would expect it. I didn't know that UNIX didn't > > keep track of file creation times 5-6 years after I started using it. > > Well, you just proved how useless a feature it tends to be. I disagree. > The problem with "file creation time" is that its potentially misleading. Thats > one of the reasons its called "file modification time". That's one of the reasons why there is both a file creation time as well as a file modification time. > Take, for example, the case where someone pulls up a file, edits one word, > and saves it. In those cases, the distinction between creation and modification > time _may_ be remotely useful. > > However, given that the same user could open the file, replace the entire > contents, and close it, you have to ask the question... Did they modify the > file, or create a new one? The result is that there is no functional difference > between deleting the old file and creating the new one, or just overwriting the > old one with new data. One could argue, therefore, that the file 'creation' > date is the same as the last modification date, as thats when the current > contents of the file was 'created'. > > All-in-all, something along the lines of "inode allocated timestamp" is > probably not all that useful. I disagree. The file creation time will tell when this particular document has been created. Useful for "give me everything created after/before" searches. The file modification time tells me when this document was changed the last time. The file access time tells me when somebody used the file the last time. That's three different times, and all have valid uses. Please see my other posting about this topic, too. -Christoph Sold To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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