Re: bottom-up mtimes (was Re: (reiserfs) Re: I discussed reading . . .)
Jamie Lokier (lkd@tantalophile.demon.co.uk)
Fri, 25 Jun 1999 23:38:55 +0200
Kragen Sitaker wrote:
> Somebody wrote:
> > Next [for W2K emulation] files need to be able to inherit stat data, so
> > that a file can share its modification time with its parent
> > directory, so that modifying the file changes the mod time on the
> > directory.
>
> This opens some interesting possibilities:
> - - updatedb need only run on directories that have been changed;
> - - more-sophisticated versions of updatedb (full-text indexing? stat
> data?) could become feasible to update rapidly;
> - - locate could manually search directories that are newer than updatedb's
> last run, meaning locate could give correct results
> - - find could be implemented in terms of locate (except for -atime)
With something like `find' inheriting mtime doesn't work because mtimes
can be reset with utime(), see `touch --date=...' or `touch --file=...'.
You normally want that to affect Make (that's usually deliberate), but
not a program like find which should always give the same results _as
if_ it did a full scan.
-- Jamie
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