On Mon, 10 Mar 2025 09:58:28 -0400 "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@xxxxxxx> wrote: > On Mon, Mar 10, 2025 at 07:26:00AM +0000, Artem S. Tashkinov wrote: > > > > Why is it that the Linux kernel supports reading btime, but there's no > > syscall to change it? At least for ext4 there's the debugfs utility, but > > for other filesystems there's just nothing. And even debugfs is not a > > solution, since it requires root privileges and an unmounted/mounted RO > > filesystem. > > POSIX and Single Unix Specification also doesn't provide a way to > allow userspace to set ctime (inode change time). That's because the > definition of "change time" is defined to include the time to change > anything about the inode metadata --- including the inode timestamps. > I'm sure that hadn't used to be the case. But as some point the 'ctime' changed from something that was usually the file create time (for some definition of create) to a pretty useless time that is almost a waste of disk space. David
