Uses for access time

[John Chambers]

One of my more common uses is to ask when some program was 
last executed.  Common programs for which I wish to know
this are uucico, uux, rnews, etc.  Sometimes I can finger
email problems by observing that some program hasn't been
run since last Tuesday, so the problem must be with cron
or some such culprit.

As a special case, it is often hard to determine which of
several alternatives with the same name (which can easily
happen on a Sun with lots of NFS clients) cron has run.
Waiting for the program to run, and checking the access
times is a simple way to answer the question.  Very often,
the answer is surprising.

-- 
John Chambers <{adelie,ima,maynard,mit-eddie}!minya!{jc,root}> (617/484-6393)

You can't make a turtle come out.
	-- Malvina Reynolds