On Mon, Jan 17, 2005 at 12:44:01PM -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: > On Monday 17 January 2005 11:09, Jon LaBadie wrote: > > ... > > > >The final item is to report back your success to the list. I'd like > > to use JS's star as it has the ability on Solaris, to not change > > the atime or the ctime during backup. > > atime at least seems to be covered in the new tar-1.15-1 Jon, here is the > --help screen: > ------------------------ > [EMAIL PROTECTED] root]# tar --help > Usage: tar [OPTION...] [FILE]... > GNU `tar' saves many files together into a single tape or disk archive, and > can > restore individual files from the archive. > ... > > Handling of file attributes: > > --atime-preserve don't change access times on dumped files
That option has been there for a long time. However, if you use it then the ctime gets changed. That is a normal OS feature of unix-like systems. Dump programs, as they do not work through the file system, don't affect either atime nor ctime. It would be nice if backups with tar could to that also. Shilly found an obscure ioctl that was added to Solaris to support some Sun product. It allows the resetting of atime without affecting ctime. It is not guarenteed to remain in Solaris, but has been there for over 10 years. That is the Solaris-specific capability of star to which I referred. -- Jon H. LaBadie [EMAIL PROTECTED] JG Computing 4455 Province Line Road (609) 252-0159 Princeton, NJ 08540-4322 (609) 683-7220 (fax)
