Re: attributes of renamed file

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From: David Mazieres (dm@reeducation-labor.lcs.mit.edu)
Date: 03/07/00-09:16:30 AM Z 

Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2000 10:16:30 -0500 (EST)
Message-Id: <200003071516.KAA31785@reeducation-labor.lcs.mit.edu>
From: David Mazieres <dm@reeducation-labor.lcs.mit.edu>
Subject: Re: attributes of renamed file

> Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2000 16:05:06 +0100
> From: Michael Salmon <Michael.Salmon@uab.ericsson.se>
> 
> The ctime is only updated when the inode changes and the file's name is not
> coupled to the inode. File names only exist in directories, a file doesn't
> even need to have a name.

Perhaps in part for historical reasons (since rename used to be a
non-atomic link and unlink), rename bumps the ctime of a file.  It
would be very difficult to do things like incremental backups of a
directory without this feature, however, so I think it's not a bad
thing.

More concretely, though, I just tried this out on a solaris box, and
rename definitely bumps the ctime of a file, whether or not you agree
with the behavior.  It has been my experience that all Unixes do this.

David

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