[clug] what's happened to atime?

[David Deaves]

> 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!
> 

Note: you may also need to look at the   'strictatime'  option