Re: Re: file creation time

[Arun Sharma <arun@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Mar 12, 2001 at 01:42:30PM -0000, Karthika  Sivaramakrishnan wrote:
> Quoting Pichai Asokan
> > Will the inode timestamps be of any use?
> 
> What does the inode timestamp stand for, and how can I access it?
> 

File last modified :) You read it using stat(2). Read the archives
for a discussion of the same topic.

BTW, a lot of the questions you've been asking on the list are 
interesting, but not supported on general purpose UNIX OSes, because
it conflicts with the "small and beautiful" philosophy. Not very 
unlike the reasons Linus rejects debugger patches. 

The general trend is to write kernel extensions (ioctl and other
abused APIs) to get it to do what you want.

For some, like the file creation time, it's not easy to do it, without
being incompatible with an unmodified Linux. My query on a freebsd
mailing list was mainly met with "tell us why you need the creation
time stamp ?" question.

One suggestion is to: link all your apps with a modified libc, which
sends a signal to some pre-registered process, every time a file
is created via libc. Of course, you can use a more efficient IPC to
do this - but you get the idea.

	-Arun