I was wondering if it was at all possible to change the timestamp of a soft link. I want to change it to a time in the past before it was created.

Sceanrio:

In a directory i have a number of softlinks whih point to files, a script processes these files oldest first bassed on the time the softlink was created.

If for example i wanted a certain file to be processed next i would need a way to make the timestamp of the softlink the oldest in the DIR. At the moment the only way i can do this is to remake all the soft links apart from the file i want processed next so all the others have a new timestamp.

This is not ever convient as it then means the remaing files all have the same timestamp and no longer have an order.


I was wondering if there is a way i can update the time of the soft link to make it the oldest in the DIR?

any ideas?

try touch command go through touch man page

Using Touch only updates the timestamp of the source file. i need to update the time of the soft link.

Remove and then recreate the symlink.

On FreeBSD, touch also support 'touching' the link:

man page:

Unfortunatly touch on my box does not have a -h option. thanks for the info though. Anyone else got any other ideas?

Perderabo named the way to do it - for example, in C or perl call unlink() then symlink()