Filesystems, Disks and Memory

Hi,

I am trying to duplicate a symbolic link, the new link should be the exact replica of the original one, with same file attributes, permissions, owner, group and even the time.

i m successful in changing the owner and group, but when i try to change the time using utime, the time of the file which is pointed to by this link get updated.

for example, there is file1 and file1_link is a symbolic link to file1. something like this:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 avni avni 5 Feb 27 11:44 file1_link -> file1
-rw-rw-rw- 1 avni avni 2061 Feb 26 18:47 file1

now i have to duplicate file1_link so that i have

lrwxrwxrwx 1 avni avni 5 Feb 27 11:44 file1_link_dup -> file1

but instead i get
lrwxrwxrwx 1 avni avni 5 Feb 28 11:30 file1_link_dup -> file1

when is do utime for file1_link_dup the result is something like this:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 avni avni 5 Feb 27 11:44 file1_link -> file1
-rw-rw-rw- 1 avni avni 2061 Feb 27 11:44 file1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 avni avni 5 Feb 28 11:30 file1_link_dup -> file1

can any body tell how this can be achieved.
I read about lutimes, but its not on my system.


I am new to UNIX and hence have little knowledge of the various distributions and commands available.


Thanks in advance.

hi guys....

all the searches for any hint to modify the time for links have failed.

It seems to be a hopeless search. I thought I would get some information on this from this forum.....

Anyways, what I feel is that, there is entry of the link in FAT, and hence there is some inode pointing to the link. By any means can I directly modify that inode entry, and is doing so safe?( Safe in the sense, directly modifying FAT entry, wouldn't that create any problems?)