Hello all,

In C - Is there a way of setting a timestamp for a file, and keeping it unchanged?

Status information of the file in structure stat is modified automatically, and therefore, as I understand, is not good for that purpose ...

...

Thank you in advance.

If other users can access the file, you cannot stop them from updating the timestamp on the file. If you open the file, then read or write the file you can get the file's mtime from a stat call, then when you are done with the file, you can reset filetimes with a utime call, using the data you got from stat.

All this sounds bogus to me. What are you trying to accomplish? not how to do what you are attempting to do that looks odd. It may be what you have to do, but I kind of doubt it.

Hello Jim,
What I was trying to do was simulating functions of an OS, which enables manually setting timestamps on files.

Thank you very much for your reply.

Look at the GNU C code for touch. Download from here:
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/

Normally the kernel/filesystem maintains timestamps so you would have to look at that code if your OS is opensource.