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Full Discussion: SImple command question
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers SImple command question Post 14949 by Perderabo on Friday 8th of February 2002 08:43:02 AM
Old 02-08-2002
See this post for a explanation of ctime and mtime.

As for creation time, remember that when Ken Thompson wrote unix in 1969 it was revolutionary to have a file system shared by multiple users. The way unix worked back then encouraged people to create a new file and remove the old one if you were updating a file that was accessed by multiple people. Also it was necessary to periodically copy a filesystem to tape and reload the disk to defragment files. These things made a creation date silly.

By the late 70's, unix had more robust filesystems that no longer needed re-orgs and it had file locking system calls. This made creation date a possibility. And indeed HP added it into the first generation of HP-UX. At that time I was a sysadmin of an HP 9000/520 with creation date and an ATT 3B2 without creation date, so I got to see them side by side. Yes, creation date was useful several times a year, but I never really missed it on the 3B2. And creation date expanded both in-core and on-disk inodes by 4 bytes. So it's not like you get it for free. When HP rewrote HP-UX to use the McKusick filesystem, they dropped creation date. No one really complained very loudly.

There is a lot of competition in unix. Any features added to a kernel must pass a cost/benefit test or they will be dropped. The benchmarks enforce this rather strongly. Creation date had its day in court, but I doubt that any unix version still in existence has a creation date.

Microsoft OS's in contrast have little competition and are not written to win benchmarks. That's why they have a poorly thought out selection of features in their kernels.
 

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LEARN ABOUT SUSE

pcl3opts

PCL3OPTS(1)						      General Commands Manual						       PCL3OPTS(1)

NAME

       pcl3opts -- determine options for the ghostscript driver pcl3 from a PCL-3+ file

SYNOPSIS

       pcl3opts [-o output_file]  [input_file ...]

DESCRIPTION

       The  command  pcl3opts  is  intended  to help in determining which options one should use when calling ghostscript using pcl3 for driving a
       PCL-3+ printer.	It analyzes one or more PCL input_files and issues on the output_file its best guess as to which options one should  spec-
       ify in order to produce files using a similar configuration.  The default output_file is standard output.  If no input_files are specified,
       the command reads from standard input.

       This command is mostly of interest if you have access to PCL files generated by software provided by the printer's manufacturer, for  exam-
       ple if you have a manufacturer-supplied Microsoft Windows driver for your printer.  In that case you can generate a few files under Windows
       using different settings and let pcl3opts examine them.

LIMITATIONS

       Note that pcl3opts cannot guarantee that the collection of options it proposes leads to a file which is understood by the printer.  It  can
       merely provide a best guess.

       In  addition,  some settings require interpretation of the page contents in order to properly translate them into options for pcl3 and some
       cannot reliably be derived from a PCL file at all.  Finding good values for these  parameters  is  beyond  pcl3opts's  capabilities.   This
       includes LeadingEdge, SendBlackLast, Tumble and the distinction between the colour models CMY+K and CMYK.

SEE ALSO

       gs-pcl3(1)

AUTHOR

       Copyright (C) 2000, 2001 by Martin Lottermoser, GreifswaldstraBe 28, 38124 Braunschweig, Germany.  E-mail: Martin.Lottermoser@t-online.de.

       Version of this reference page: $Revision: 1.10 $ ($Date: 2001/02/10 17:01:06 $).

pcl3 3.2															       PCL3OPTS(1)
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