ext4 - getting at birth time (file create time) and getting/setting nanosecond time stamps and utime

[Steve French]

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 1:58 PM, Jeremy Allison <jra at samba.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 12:55:29PM -0600, Andreas Dilger wrote:
>>
>> As for _updating_ create time, isn't that sort of defeating the purpose
>> of create time?
>
> Yes, you would think so, wouldn't you. Unfortunately that's
> the way Windows behaves (create time can be updated) so that's
> what we have to emulate. If does indeed make no sense (it's
> just another timestamp meta-data that can't be used for auditing
> at that point).

Updating create time does make it harder to use for auditing, but
I expect that 20 years ago when this was added someone was thinking
about making sure you could preserve all attributes on backup/restore
especially for a system restore after disk failure - and end up with
the same file metadata as when you started.


-- 
Thanks,

Steve