File creation times

Posted Jul 29, 2010 3:09 UTC (Thu) by ctpm (guest, #35884)
Parent article: File creation times

"After all, almost nobody uses ctime anyway"

Well that's not quite true. Unless you discount Tar as a seldom used, almost unknown obscure application.

The fact is that, generally, a program that relies on tar (for example, Amanda) to create incremental dumps should be able to get a proper ctime for each file. See the "-g" option on the GNU Tar manpage.

There might be other tools that depend on current ctime behaviour. Somehow I don't think that breaking people's backups is the way to go, so a separate field seems rather wiser.

Regards

Cláudio

File creation times

Posted Jul 29, 2010 22:00 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

And dar. And rdiff-backup. And probably amanda and every other backup program on earth capable of incremental backups. (I haven't found any but dump(8) that can avoid backing up the data if only the metadata has changed. That's a clever trick that should be emulated, I think, and I never thought I'd say that about *anything* dump(8) did...)