Greg Wallace wrote:
I found some almost right away. I still don't really understand when each date is changed.
Basically: atime, the "access time": whenever a file is opened for reading and closed afterwards. mtime, the "modified time": whenever a file is written to. ctime, the "status change time": whenever a file is written to, its name, or other meta information is changed. Now the exception for atime: File systems can be mounted with a flag that causes the atime not to be updated on read access (option noatime). The NFS server also doesn't update atime on reading (well, sometimes); thus this information on NFS-mounted file systems is not always true.
I would like to try to create a new file and get all 3 dates set to different values.
I don't know of any way to do that. You can change the atime and the mtime with touch later, after creation. Each touch will update ctime, since you update meta information about the file (see above). HTH, Joachim -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Joachim Schrod Email: jschrod@acm.org Roedermark, Germany