UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

look into 'pax' - 'man pax':

Code:

.....................
 -p string
           Specifies one  or  more  file  characteristic  options
           (privileges).  The  string  option-argument  must be a
           string specifying file characteristics to be  retained
           or discarded on extraction. The string consists of the
           specification characters a, e, m, o, and  p.  Multiple
           characteristics  can  be  concatenated within the same
           string and multiple -p options can be  specified.  The
           meaning  of  the  specification characters are as fol-
           lows:

     a     Does not preserve file access times.

     e     Preserves the user  ID,  group  ID,  file  mode  bits,
           access time, and modification time.

     m     Does not preserve file modification times.

     o     Preserves the user ID and group ID.
.....................

Hi.

Indeed, on a brief test of pax, the access time was preserved on the restore ... cheers, drl

Yes drl you are correct. But if an archiving utility like tar includes the ability to carefully restore the original's atime (which requires extra work, i.e. modifying the inode after the file is read), it would be bizarre if the programmers didn't also include the ability to set the extracted copy's atime (which requires absolutely no extra work, because tar always sets the extracted copy's time correctly, and assuming it also sets the atime to something, it is no extra work to set it to the correct value).

Correct. And even if I tar files from such a filesystem (which hence always have an atime long in the past), the atime of the extracted copy is the current time. And also, even if I tar files and *extract* them onto a filesystem that does not record the atime (mount option noatime), the atime is set to the extraction time.

But how? Presumably they are stored in the tar archive, but where? And if I wanted a tool that reads stuff from a tar archive, the tool "tar" would be my choice :-)

We are talking about 10000 to 100000 files here. Possibly there are scripts that store and later reset the atimes, but I don't know of any.

Awesome. I will definitely try pax. Thanks a lot to you and drl!