On Mon, Jan 17, 2005 at 12:44:01PM -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Monday 17 January 2005 11:09, Jon LaBadie wrote:
> >
...
> >
> >The final item is to report back your success to the list.  I'd like
> > to use JS's star as it has the ability on Solaris, to not change
> > the atime or the ctime during backup.
> 
> atime at least seems to be covered in the new tar-1.15-1 Jon, here is the 
> --help screen:
> ------------------------
> [root@coyote root]# tar --help
> Usage: tar [OPTION...] [FILE]...
> GNU `tar' saves many files together into a single tape or disk archive, and 
> can
> restore individual files from the archive.
> 
...
> 
>  Handling of file attributes:
> 
>       --atime-preserve       don't change access times on dumped files


That option has been there for a long time.  However, if you use it
then the ctime gets changed.  That is a normal OS feature of unix-like
systems.  Dump programs, as they do not work through the file system,
don't affect either atime nor ctime.  It would be nice if backups with
tar could to that also.

Shilly found an obscure ioctl that was added to Solaris to support
some Sun product.  It allows the resetting of atime without affecting
ctime.  It is not guarenteed to remain in Solaris, but has been there
for over 10 years.  That is the Solaris-specific capability of star
to which I referred.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
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