On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 2:21 PM, Benny Halevy <bhalevy@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Jul. 22, 2010, 20:24 +0300, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 10:03 AM, Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>> >>> I beg to differ. ctime is not completely useless. It reflects changes on >>> the inode for when you don't you change the content. >> >> Uh. Yes. Except that why is file metadata really different from file >> data? Most people really don't care. And a lot of people have asked >> for creation dates - and I seriously doubt that Windows people >> complain a lot about the fact that there you have mtime for metadata >> changes too. >> >> The point being that Unix ctime semantics certainly have well-defined >> semantics, but they are in no way "better" than having a real creation >> time, and are often worse. > > Yeah, having create time would be important. > That said, having a non user-settable modify timestamp is crucial > for quickly determining whether a file has changed. How would "cp --archive" and a host of backup/restore tools work without user-settable modify timestamps? Or are you proposing another timestamp? I do computer forensics, I like timestamps, but enough is enough. Greg -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
