Re: why does open ">..." sometimes touches the directory?

[flexvault]

in reply to why does open ">..." sometimes touches the directory?

Hello Mark_Galeck,

Since you're on Linux, what you are seeing is "normal". Occasionally I get interrupted and forget where I put a file, I can go to the head of the file system and follow the updated directories to locate the file. ( Hint: all directories are 'touch'ed, and on a very active system this technique may not work. ) When installing your *nix, you can turn this feature off to get better performance. Usually flash drives and Live CD/DVDs are build this way.

If you have administrative rights you can use the 'ln -s' command to bypass how you access the file, for example:

  /home/mark/bin/myscript           ## This file exists
  ln -s /home/mark/bin /mark        ## /mark is symbolic link to /home
+/mark/bin
  touch /mark/myscript              ## change timestamp on directories
+ to myscript

The actual directories to 'myscript' will have their timestamps updated, but the symbolic link '/mark' will not change. ( If that is what you want ).

However as a system admin, I would be very concerned about 'end users' not wanting to show that they added/updated a file.

Good Luck...Ed

Update: This tested correctly on AIX, but after reading dave_the_m comments, I tried it on a "debian" and a "suse" systems with mixed results.