Correct! Now, is a directory access a file access? I don't think it
should be.
Why not? It has been forever at least for ext2. Have a look at the
end of fs/ext2/dir.c:ext2_readdir().
I think POSIX even states that this is how things should work.
Those who consider the overhead of ATIME updates completely
unacceptable should enable NO_ATIME on their partitions.
ATIME is the access time for an inode, when you read an inode which
happens to be a directory you are accessing it.
Later,
David "Sparc" Miller
davem@caip.rutgers.edu