file read dates

[Larry Stewart]

Who looks at file read dates?  Do any more-or-less standard Unix
applications look at them?  Are they worth the trouble of maintaining?

For example, a literal interpretation of the semantics of file read dates
in Unix would require that the inode for a directory be re-written every
time the directory was scanned for a file...  Since one can mount
a file system read-only, I presume this is not always done.

	-Larry Stewart
	 Digital Equipment Corporation Systems Research Center