Uses for access time, stuff in i

[Scott E. Preece]

From: <daveb at llama.rtech.uucp>
> >I tend to think that O_SYNC is specifically intended for those folks
> >who are explicitly willing to put up with the performance hit of 2
> >physical writes/call.
> 
> OK, then you write the inode when the file size changes, and update the
> mod/access time at close.  Maybe you have O_SYNC work this way if an
> additional (or alternative) option, say O_FASTSYNC was provided.
----------
Maybe the semantics should be separated, so that data can be written
synchronously and control information asynchronously.  I understand your
problem and can see that many people would not care about the updating
of the times; on the other hand, many people WOULD care, too.  If, for
instance, you had a data distribution daemon that only did its thing
when it noticed that the file had changed, you would want to make sure
that any change ended up in a mod time update.  it may not be your
problem, but it is somebody's problem.

-- 
scott preece
gould/csd - urbana
uucp:	ihnp4!uiucuxc!urbsdc!preece
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