Uses for access time

[Eric Koldinger]

>>>Unfortunately, "access time" is NOT updated when an executable is
>>>executed. I was once on a system whose very clever administrator wrote a
>>>demon to archive any file not "accessed" in the last month. He soon
>>>archived an executable I was exec'ing every day from my .profile.
>>
>>I tried this on several systems, and it seems that you are correct for
>>BSD (at least the Ultrix and SunOS versions), but not for SysV (again at
>>least Xenix and 2B2/300 flavors). I'm glad you pointed this out, since I
>>do just what you mention on my machine (SysV).

I hate to disagree with you, but 4.3 BSD does update the access time
when a program is executed.  I just checked /usr/local/rn with an ls -lu,
and I got the following:
    -rwxr-xr-x  1 root       137216 May  7 11:59 /usr/local/rn
and the date right now is (according to date):
    Sat May  7 12:04:41 PDT 1988
so I'd say if got touched when I fired up this process up.

Perhaps you've been checking on read only file systems, or perhaps the
program wasn't working right and archiving files that hadn't been changed
in a while.

		_   /|				Eric
		\`o_O'				kolding at ji.berkeley.edu
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