[clug] what's happened to atime?

[Alex Satrapa]

On 19/04/2010, at 19:56 , Daniel Pittman wrote:

> Michael James <michael at james.st> writes:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Er, personally I would start with looking at the logs from my change
> management tool, or the output of my shell first, but obviously YMMV.

I'm with Daniel on this one - the way to check that a daemon has read the appropriate config file is to:
 - read the logging output
 - run the daemon with verbose logging
 - check the output of 'ps uxwww | grep http' and discover there's an explicit config file specified
 - check /proc/ for the file handles in use
 - use trace tools (strace?)
 - check the startup script and remember that you'd moved the config files to /opt/local/...

The 'atime' on the file system may or may not correlate to your daemon opening that file. There are other things that might be looking at that file any time it's been modified (on a Mac, we have Spotlight or Time Machine, for example).

Alex