Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: [PATCH 02/18] xstat: Add a pair of system calls to make extended file stats available [ver #6] | From | Trond Myklebust <> | Date | Thu, 22 Jul 2010 13:16:07 -0400 |
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On Thu, 2010-07-22 at 19:03 +0200, Jan Engelhardt wrote: > On Thursday 2010-07-22 18:40, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > >On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 9:27 AM, Jeremy Allison <jra@samba.org> wrote: > >> On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 08:47:46AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > >>> Tell me why we shouldn't just do this right? > >> > >> No, ctime isn't the same as Windows "create time". > > > >Umm. What kind of reading problems do you guys have? > > > >I know effin well that ctime isn't the same as Windows create time. > >THAT WAS MY POINT. > > > >But the fact is, th Unix ctime semantics are insane and largely > >useless. There's a damn good reason almost nobody uses ctime under > >unix. > > I beg to differ. ctime is not completely useless. It reflects changes on > the inode for when you don't you change the content. It's like an mtime > for the metadata. It comes useful when you go around in your filesystem > trying to figure out who of your co-admins screwed up the permissions on > /etc/passwd... and if the mtime is the same as that of the last backup, > I can at least have a reasonable assurance that it was /only/ the > metadata that was tampered with. (SHA1 check, yeah yeah, costly on large > files.)
Errr... Only if you eliminate utimes() from your syscall table. Otherwise it is trivial to reset the mtime after changing the file contents.
Cheers Trond
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