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Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2001 16:30:35 +0200
From: Martin Kraemer <Martin.Kraemer@Fujitsu-Siemens.com>
To: "William A. Rowe, Jr." <wrowe@rowe-clan.net>
Cc: dev@apr.apache.org
Subject: Re: file attribute questions
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 from wrowe@rowe-clan.net on Tue, Aug 21, 2001 at 09:07:49AM -0500

On Tue, Aug 21, 2001 at 09:07:49AM -0500, William A. Rowe, Jr. wrote:
> Just out of curiosity, What apps
> would ever rely on ctime?

Hmm. You're right. ISTR that mail user agents were a candidate, but
I _think_ they only monitor mtime vs. atime to see if someone else
accessed the mailbox.

As it's extremely difficult to manipulate the ctime field, and very
difficult to set it to arbitrary values (which you could do with
the other two, using utime(2); BTW: A side effect of utime()
is that the ctime field is updated to the current time),
it can be used to monitor things like link creation,
permission modes' change etc. 

One well known program doing this is the tripwire program. 

Maybe a backup program could also be interested to see what to scan for
in an incremental backup?

   Martin
-- 
<Martin.Kraemer@Fujitsu-Siemens.com>         |     Fujitsu Siemens
Fon: +49-89-636-46021, FAX: +49-89-636-47655 | 81730  Munich,  Germany