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Re: ctime: creation or change time?


Christopher Faylor wrote:

Your arguments would be a little more persuasive if you did more than
postulate the surety of breakage and actually pointed to real breakage
or, at least, demonstrated how a windows application would be harmed by
cygwin's handling of ctime.

The motivating example for my original query is my own application, which includes a file access monitoring and reporting component. "Incidental" modifications to file attributes, such as the change to modification time that occurs as a side-effect of writing to a file, are exluded from the reports because they are not interesting for my purposes. Logically, setting the ctime as Cygwin now does is such an "incidental" modification, in that it is not explicitly requested by the user. However, there is no way for me to distinguish those changes from actual explicit modifications to ctime by the user. My application is not "broken" per se, but this change in behavior leads to a large volume of noise in my file operation logs, significantly reducing their utility. I can likely code around this, but because it seemed to me a clear incompatibility with the defined semantics of NTFS, I thought it worth the time to inquire.


Another application that may be affected by this change is native-Win32 gmake, which uses file ctimes in some fashion when constructing hash tables of directory contents. I readily admit that I do not understand that code well enough at the moment to say with absolute certainty that the change in Cygwin behavior will adversely affect that program.

Thanks,

Eric Melski


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