[Fwd: question for file attributes (atime, ctime)]

Wayne Davison wayned at samba.org
Tue Oct 26 22:46:01 GMT 2004


On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 10:17:15AM -0400, Yasushi Okubo wrote:
> What we are having problem is that when rsync gets kicked off and
> transfers one file to the destination, this action changes ctime of
> "all" files in the same directory and sub directories on the
> destination side

Rsync only preserves the mtime for the files it transfers -- atime gets
set to "now" if the file is transferred or if the file was scanned for
some reason (e.g. --checksum was used).  The ctime is set by the system
if something in the inode was changed.  This could mean something as
simple as rsync needing to set the mode of the file to match the mode of
the source file, for instance.  There is no way to preserve ctime using
standard library calls, so this is not something that will ever change.
There is a diff in the patches dir that adds the ability to preserve the
atime, however (at the cost of some extra memory for all transfers, even
if you aren't preserving the atime).

..wayne..


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