All Questions
Tagged with filesystemstimestamps
29 questions
-1votes
0answers
68views
why does isn't the crtime preserved even when specifying it should? [duplicate]
I'm on Ubuntu Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS with Ext4 and I'm trying to copy file to an external drive on /media/<user>/<Drive>. Which I have formatted with ext4, to have compatibility. I have ...
- 101
35votes
2answers
4kviews
Why is filesystem time always some msecs behind system time in Linux?
In Linux, it seems that filesystem time is always some milliseconds behind system time, leading to inconsistencies if you want to check if a file has been modified before or after a given time in very ...
3votes
2answers
2kviews
Why does this use of `cp -a` not preserve creation time?
I copy some directories with -a in order to preserve=all which I understood would include creation times: cp -a ./* /mnt/destination/ When inspecting the resulting directories in the destination they ...
- 551
2votes
1answer
483views
Why is atime updating when equal to mtime and ctime?
I'm trying to understand how inode access time is handled with the default "relatime" mount option in Linux, but the behavior documented in mount(8) doesn't quite match what I see. It says: ...
- 23
0votes
1answer
632views
`cat` affects last `Access` time but not last `Change` time
On my Ubuntu system, I've created a new file prueba.txt using touch prueba.txt. When I show its file statistics using stat prueba.txt, the output is as follows: File: prueba.txt Size: 0 ...
0votes
1answer
332views
Access time strangeness
According to the mount man page, Access time is only updated if the previous access time was earlier than the current modify or change time. However if I do this (ext4 with relatime option(*)): > ...
- 9,248
1vote
1answer
401views
File timestamps on different OSes
Are file timestamps (Created/birth, accessed and modified) the same on different OSes? Particularly on Windows and Linux. I downloaded a file which is modified on Windows and its timestamps looked ...
- 11
1vote
0answers
160views
mtime difference of microseconds
The following file $ stat Louis-Jens-Kusi.jpg File: Louis-Jens-Kusi.jpg Size: 183455 Blocks: 360 IO Block: 4096 regular file Device: 824h/2084d Inode: 4720932 Links: 1 ...
- 11
3votes
0answers
170views
How to stop dolphin from updating file access times
I would like to utilize access times as an indicator to figure out which files I am actually still using. But whenever i view a directory in dolphin, the access timestamps of many of the contained ...
1vote
1answer
1kviews
Since when do Unix systems support birth/creation time (btime/crtime) for files and directories?
Does anyone know when Unix supports birth/creation time stamps for files and directories? If possible also when first file manager (GUI) displays it by default for users. For comparison with Windows, ...
- 13
0votes
1answer
28views
A filesystem link which inherits modification date
I'm trying to update multiple arch distros over LAN according to arch wiki. In provided solution hard links are created to *.db files to /var/cache/pacman/pkg and this folder is what the web-server ...
- 219
0votes
0answers
1kviews
birth/crtime timestamp is recorded on one xfs but not the other xfs filesystem
Two different xfs filesystems on two different Fedora. Why one of them records Birth(crtime) in the inode and why the other one doesn't? How to find the configuration/attribute differences between ...
2votes
1answer
2kviews
File timestamps precision - ext3 with nanoseconds, ext4 with milliseconds
People say ext3 supports file timestamp precision up to seconds and ext4 up to nanoseconds. What happens is that my old VPS running Ubuntu 12.04 with an ext3 filesystem always (as far as I can ...
- 51
1vote
0answers
45views
Can you set a file's ctime to min(ctime, mtime) [duplicate]
We know that the mtime of a file can be earlier than the ctime when you make copies of files (or, in my case, move files between file systems without successfully retaining timestamps). I see many ...
- 1,982
2votes
1answer
3kviews
A simple way to update the access time of multiple files
I have a folder with several sub-folders and files. I work on a server where any files that are older than 60 days are automatically deleted. What are some simple commands to update the access time (...
- 123
