HP-UX

Hi All ,

I have a file which gets updated by a korn job daily . The file gets the latest timestamp on everyrun.
But of late i have observed that the file timestamp gets modified to a older date ( Oct 25 2006 ) at some point in time of the day. This change has nothing to do with the job which updates this file.
There is some unknown process which is acting on this and changing the timestamp ( to Oct25 2006 ) everyday. Once the korn job runs it puts the right time stamp. The unexpected change is happening at some other time by some other process.
Could anyone help me find a way to identify the unknown process in question which is modifying the timestamp of this file.

Note : the unknown process is not playing with the content of the file..

Thanks
Sridhar

The script has to touch. Or a program call utime().

Can you change the filelocation to a directory that only THE one process can update or write the timestamped file? That would fix the problem.

Another way is to run a script:

loop at one second intervals
{
ps -ef > tmpfile
check filetime on the file, if changed exit loop
}
email somebody with the contents of tmpfile. Then try to decipher which processes could be the culprits, and research each of them. Maybe grep for a timestring that matches what the file gets set to? Or search production logs?

No great solution. There are no great solutions that I know of. fuser will show who has a file open, but not who is running utime against a file.