behavior of file(1) in AIX PS/2 v1.1

[Richard M. Mathews]

vlcek at athena.mit.edu (Jim C Vlcek) writes:
>I know I'm betraying my ignorance here, but I'll ask anyway:  what do
>people find the "change" time useful for?  I always key on the access
>time (generally to find "dead" files that no one uses any more that
>can be deleted) and the modify time (usually to sniff out files that
>have been updated since a distribution was installed).  I don't know
>if I've ever looked at the change time.

The default cleanup of /tmp done by /usr/adm/daily in AIX 1.2 uses
	find .... -atime +2 -ctime +2
The theory is that at least one of access-time or change-time will be
updated when anything interesting happens to a file.  When a file is
read in using "backup" or "cpio", the mod-time and access-time might be
set back, but the change-time will reflect the time it was put there.
Any modification of the file will also set the change-time.

Richard M. Mathews			Freedom for Lithuania
Locus Computing Corporation		       Laisve!
richard at locus.com
lcc!richard at seas.ucla.edu
...!{uunet|ucla-se|turnkey}!lcc!richard