What action updates a file's ACCESS time?

[Thomas J. Gilg]

Roughly speaking (HP-UX and Domain/OS), the sys/stat.h fields available are:

   o st_atime     Field indicating when file data was last accessed.  Changed
                  by the following system calls: creat(2), mknod(2), pipe(2),
                  read(2), readv (on read(2)), and utime(2).

   o st_mtime     Field indicating when data was last modified.  Changed by
                  the following system calls: creat(2), truncate(2),
                  ftruncate (on truncate(2)), mknod(2), pipe(2), prealloc(2),
                  utime(2), write(2), and writev (on write(2)).  Also changed
                  by close(2) when the reference count reaches zero on a named
                  pipe (FIFO special) file that contains data.

  o st_ctime      Field indicating when file status was last changed.  Changed
                  by the following system calls: chmod(2), chown(2), creat(2),
                  fchmod(2), fchown(2), truncate(2), ftruncate (on truncate(2)),
                  link(2), mknod(2), pipe(2), prealloc(2), rename(2), setacl(2),
                  unlink(2), utime(2), write(2), and writev (on write(2)).

Consult your favorite man page on "stat"

Thomas Gilg
tomg at cv.hp.com