[PLUG] ctime and lunatics

Ed Sawicki ed at alcpress.com
Wed Oct 23 17:29:25 UTC 2002


On Wed, 2002-10-23 at 10:02, Russ Johnson wrote:
> * Ed Sawicki <ed at alcpress.com> [2002-10-23 09:31]:
> > Can someone with a richer Unix background than I give
> > me a historical perspective on why a file's ctime changes
> > when the file is modified?
> > I expect mtime and atime to change, but ctime? Seems
> > like lunacy to me, which means there's a good reason
> > I'm not privy to.
> 
> ctime is "time of last modification of file status information"
> 
> If the file information (size, inode, mtime, atime, anything at all?)
> changes, then the ctime changes.

Thanks. Other file systems/operating systems I've dealt with
consider ctime to be the file's creation time. You always know
when the file was created because that historic information is
always there. We don't have this with Linux/ext2/3. On the
positive side, we know the date and time of the last change
to a file's properties. Unfortunately, ctime is changed not
only when you change a property, but also when you modify
the file's contents - making it far less valuable to a user
or administrator.

Ed





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