file time problem...

[George Georgalis]

I remember Carl Lowenstein once mentioning a problem with ls and certain
dates.... near 6 months or a year off, well not sure if this is the same
thing but it's defiantly a problem.

I frequently pull ip delegations from
ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/stats/

to identify countries with ip addresses.

right now on that ftp site are these 

 delegated-ripencc-20041101     1045 KB         11/01/04        00:07:00
 delegated-ripencc-latest                       11/01/04        00:07:00

when I download them, one seems a symlink, okay, but the time stamp is
different in ls -l

-r--r--r--    1 geo      geo       1069133 Nov  1  2003 delegated-ripencc-20041101
lrwxrwxrwx    1 geo      geo            26 Oct 31 21:35 delegated-ripencc-latest -> delegated-ripencc-20041101

and it's not just ls! find thinks it's a year old too!

find ./ -maxdepth 1 -mtime +365 -name 'delegated-*'
find ./ -maxdepth 1 -mtime +364 -name 'delegated-*'
./delegated-ripencc-20041101

my command to remove the old file is a bit more complex
but with atime, I'd have expected it to not be removed.

# remove the nic-assignment-file-* and delegated-* files not accessed in a while
find ./ -maxdepth 1 -type f \
        \( -atime +5 -a -mtime +5 \) \
        -a \( -name nic-assignment-file\* -o \
                -name delegated-\* \) \
        -exec \rm -f \{\} \;

so what's going on here? Today is the first time I noticed this, but I
guess it could have been happening before....

// George


-- 
George Georgalis, systems architect, administrator Linux BSD IXOYE
http://galis.org/george/ cell:646-331-2027 mailto:george at galis.org