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Top Forums UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users Why updating atime doesn't update ctime? Post 302577569 by jim mcnamara on Tuesday 29th of November 2011 10:51:02 AM
Old 11-29-2011
inodes are data about a file in a given filesystem. What is stored in an inode is system dependent, there is no standard.

POSIX compliant systems specifically update ctime (where ever it is kept) only with a change involving:
1. file creation
2. file permissions
3. acl changes
Otherwise ctime would have no meaning because it would be identical to atime. Every read access would update the file status time as well as the access time


Check out the utime() call on your system, or google for 'opengroup.org: utime'. utime() does update ctime.
 

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FILECTIME(3)								 1							      FILECTIME(3)

filectime - Gets inode change time of file

SYNOPSIS
int filectime (string $filename) DESCRIPTION
Gets the inode change time of a file. PARAMETERS
o $filename - Path to the file. RETURN VALUES
Returns the time the file was last changed, or FALSE on failure. The time is returned as a Unix timestamp. EXAMPLES
Example #1 A filectime(3) example <?php // outputs e.g. somefile.txt was last changed: December 29 2002 22:16:23. $filename = 'somefile.txt'; if (file_exists($filename)) { echo "$filename was last changed: " . date("F d Y H:i:s.", filectime($filename)); } ?> ERRORS
/EXCEPTIONS Upon failure, an E_WARNING is emitted. NOTES
Note Note: In most Unix filesystems, a file is considered changed when its inode data is changed; that is, when the permissions, owner, group, or other metadata from the inode is updated. See also filemtime(3) (which is what you want to use when you want to create "Last Modified" footers on web pages) and fileatime(3). Note Note also that in some Unix texts the ctime of a file is referred to as being the creation time of the file. This is wrong. There is no creation time for Unix files in most Unix filesystems. Note Note that time resolution may differ from one file system to another. Note The results of this function are cached. See clearstatcache(3) for more details. Tip As of PHP 5.0.0, this function can also be used with some URL wrappers. Refer to "Supported Protocols and Wrappers" to determine which wrappers support stat(3) family of functionality. SEE ALSO
filemtime(3). PHP Documentation Group FILECTIME(3)
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