mtime of target directory

[Hauke Laging]

Am Samstag, 24. September 2005 09:54 schrieb Wayne Davison:
> On Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 03:24:28AM +0200, Hauke Laging wrote:
> > /mnt/novellserver/SYS/ /backup/novell/ziel

> > /mnt/novellserver/SYS/PUBLIC/ /backup/novell/ziel
>
> That's inconsistent in what gets copied.

Yes, if you like to put it that way but intentionally. The second case was 
used for debugging purposes. I wanted the amount of data to be reduced and 
thus chose one subdirectory only.

drwxr-xr-x   48 2005-09-24 12:39 tagesbackup_differentiell_2005-09-24/
drwxr-xr-x  568 2005-09-24 03:11 tagesbackup_differentiell_2005-09-24_/
lrwxrwxrwx   51 2005-09-24 03:03 ziel 
-> /backup/novell/tagesbackup_differentiell_2005-09-24

That's part of the content of my backup directory. A script creates a 
subdirectory and sets the symlink "ziel" to it so that the rsync call does 
not have to care about the directory name (it is in another script).

In order to demonstrate the problem I have renamed the original directory 
(to *_) for that day and created a new one. Please note thate the mtime of 
that original directory is that of it's creation an not that of the rsync 
source directory:

ls -ld /mnt/novellserver/SYS
drwxr-xr-x  1 root root 512 1985-12-31 23:00 /mnt/novellserver/SYS

That's on a netware volume but that should not make any difference I think.

Now I run rsync for the subdirectory PUBLIC:
drwxr-xr-x  296 2005-09-08 17:47 tagesbackup_differentiell_2005-09-24

The mtime of the target directory is changed to the one of the source 
directory:

ls -ld /mnt/novellserver/SYS/PUBLIC
drwxr-xr-x  1 root root 512 2005-09-08 17:47 /mnt/novellserver/SYS/PUBLIC

I don't see any reason for once changing the mtime and once leaving it 
untouched. It's not a real problem for me, I am just curious if that's a 
bug (triggert by whatever). :-)


> Please clarify this.  You say that /backup/novell/ziel is a symlink,
> right?

Right. It points to the empty directory 
tagesbackup_differentiell_2005-09-24 in the same directory in both cases. 
The commands are not run one after another with the same directory/target.


> If both of those commands are run exactly as you stated, then 
> the directory that /backup/novell/ziel points to will be updated with
> the time of the source directory in both cases

I would not see the sense in this action but the point is: Both cases 
behave differently!


Best regards

Hauke
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