Re: [PATCH] utimensat implementation

H. Peter Anvin
2007-04-27T23:16:12Z

Ulrich Drepper wrote:
> H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>> Primarily to let a backup program restore the full state of the filesystem.
>
> Is this wanted? Or needed? I would think there are good reasons why
> this hasn't been done so far. Intrusion detection is one reason I can
> think of.

Well, dump/restore -- the traditional Unix backup solution -- went "the
back way" to restore the times in the filesystem.

The main use of atime seems to be to figure out when something can be
automatically deleted. Anyone else have other usage scenarios?

-hpa