Greg Wallace wrote:
Pardon the interruption, but I had been led to believe that a creation date was not maintained in Linux file systems - only last access and last modified. What command can you use to access the creation time stamp? Again, pardon the interruption, but I'd really like to know how to access this information.
Sorry, this was jargon. What actually is tested is the so-called "ctime", the time of last modification of file status information. It can be shown by the -lc options of ls. If the file has not been renamed and not edited, as it is the case for this timestamp flag file, it is the time of creation. With touch one can change the last modification date, but not the file status change date. In fact, I never understood why run-crons uses the find options -ctime and -cmin, and not -mtime and -mmin. That would allow us users to change the execution time of daily scripts with a single touch command, which would be *much* better than the current solution to delete the timestamp file with in an at job. While this is not a bug, it is still a nuisance. OTOH, my experience with SUSE's ticket system is not such that the effort to open a ticket there would be time well spent. By the way, the full formal definition of ctime is buried in the pit of the Single Unix Specification; where every function that changes the ctime value says so explicitly in its description. See http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/toc.htm Joachim -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Joachim Schrod Email: jschrod@acm.org Roedermark, Germany