timestamp on symlink

[Donovan Baarda]

On Mon, Jul 29, 2002 at 12:40:56PM +1000, Martin Pool wrote:
> On 28 Jul 2002, Michael Wang <mwang at mindspring.com> wrote:
> > rsync does not sync the timestamp on symlink (Solaris 8).
> > 
> > It is probablly due to the limitation of Unix implementation
> > of symlink, but I would like to know why rsync/Unix does not
> > do this, and what we can do about it. Is the conclusion that
> > "rsync syncs everything except the timestamp on symlink"?
> 
> I don't think it is possible to set the time of a symbolic link.  A
> quick experiment on Linux seems to confirm that:
> 
> !891 12:36 ~% python2.2
> Python 2.2.1 (#1, May  3 2002, 23:19:03) 
> [GCC 2.95.4 20011002 (Debian prerelease)] on linux2
> Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
> >>> import os
> >>> os.symlink('nothere', '/tmp/mylink')
> >>> os.utime('/tmp/mylink', None)
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
> OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/tmp/mylink'

This is because most of python's os.xxx methods de-reference symlinks. You
get this error because 'nothere' doesn't exist. The correct way to get time
info on symlinks is to use os.lstat(), which doesn't de-reference links.

Python 2.1.3 (#1, Apr 20 2002, 10:14:34) 
[GCC 2.95.4 20011002 (Debian prerelease)] on linux2
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import os
>>> os.symlink('nothere','mylink')
>>> os.lstat('mylink')
(41471, 64782L, 10L, 1, 1000, 1000, 7L, 1027913015, 1027913005, 1027913005)
>>> 

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