[clug] what's happened to atime?

[Michael James]

Back when Linux made sense, cat-ing a file changed it's atime.

So when a daemon refused to obey some configuration change,
 first you restart it and look at your file's atime with ls -lu
Hasn't been updated? It's not reading your configuration file, use strace.

Then came SSDs, benchmarks, and file system wars.
And with them came the pox of acl, xattr, and noatime.

So, why does my    /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
 not show any sign of being read when apache2 starts?

Because in this directory / phase-of-the-moon / filesystem-whim
 cat-ing a file doesn't change the atime!

root at susejam:/etc/apache2> ls -lu httpd.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8323 2010-04-19 11:55 httpd.conf
root at susejam:/etc/apache2> cat httpd.conf > /dev/null
root at susejam:/etc/apache2> ls -lu httpd.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8323 2010-04-19 11:55 httpd.conf
root at susejam:/etc/apache2> touch -a httpd.conf
root at susejam:/etc/apache2> ls -lu httpd.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8323 2010-04-19 18:36 httpd.conf


Distro	openSuSE-11.2
fstab	LABEL=ROOT2     /               ext4    acl,user_xattr          1 1
ls    -l	-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8323 2009-10-28 03:51 httpd.conf
ls  -lu	-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8323 2010-04-19 11:55 httpd.conf
lsattr	-------------e- ./httpd.conf


Anyone got a clue(bat)
michaelj

-- 
Well theme my emoticons "Disgusted".
     WHAT has Linux come to?