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Re: incorrect time stamps (ls)?


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According to Lester Ingber on 5/23/2006 11:01 PM:
> Sorry, the attachment wasn't in the last email.
> 
> I am seeing date stamps at future dates:
> 21:48:21 @lester:/cygdrive/d/Diagoran% ls -l
> total 1676
> dr-x------ 8 ingber None       0 Apr 22  2009 DI/
> 21:48:24 @lester:/cygdrive/d/Diagoran% ls -lu
> total 1676
> dr-x------ 8 ingber None       0 Dec 31  1969 DI/

According to the above output, some of your files have mtime in the
future, but atime in the past.  That seems odd, since usually modifying a
file also changes the access time.

So, what does 'stat /cygdrive/d/Diagoran/DI' show?  That is a faster way
to see the full timestamps that cygwin keeps track of, rather than using
multiple ls calls for truncated timestamps.

> 
> However, under My Computer or under Windows Explorer, I see correct dates,
> all with year 2006 (for both Date Created and Date Modified).
> 

Date Created does not correspond to atime (access time), mtime
(modification time - file contents changed), or ctime (ctime stands for
change time, ie. the last time the file contents or metadata, such as
owner or permissions, changed; and while touch can change fake atime or
mtime to any arbitrary timestamp, it is unable to alter ctime from when
the change took place); it is a fourth date stamp that NTFS keeps and
cygwin ignores.  On limited filesystems, such as FAT, which do not keep a
ctime stamp, cygwin uses the modification time for both mtime and ctime,
which is as close as we can get to POSIX without exposing weird bugs on
Win9x machines.  But I would expect cygwin's notion of mtime to match
Windows Date Modified time, and the atime to match Windows Date Accessed
time.  And the Windows GUI doesn't really have a good view into the NTFS
change time, so on filesystems where change time and modification time are
distinct, cygwin is the easiest way I know to see the last file change time.

> 
> Path:	C:\cygwin\usr\local\bin
...
> 	c:\Program
> 	Files\Windows
> 	Resource
> 	Kits\Tools\

Your path turned out weird, but that is not the issue here.

> d:  cd  CDFS       199Mb 100%    CS UN           NEW

OK, so drive D is a CDROM; perhaps Windows is giving bogus information
back when cygwin asks windows about timestamps on files on the CD?  I
would have to investigate more, but that may be a cygwin bug.  Also, would
you be willing to try a snapshot, as several file handling changes have
been committed that will eventually be part of cygwin 1.5.20, perhaps one
of them affects CD timestamps:
http://cygwin.com/faq/faq-nochunks.html#faq.setup.snapshots

- --
Life is short - so eat dessert first!

Eric Blake             ebb9@byu.net
volunteer cygwin coreutils maintainer
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