Date: Fri, 30 Dec 1994 16:18:52 -0500 From: Chuck Bacon <crtb@upcoming.dcrt.nih.gov> To: freebsd-bugs@freebsd.org, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Why does ls report wrong creation date on symlinks? Message-ID: <199412302118.QAA02761@upcoming.dcrt.nih.gov>
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I just discovered that "ls -l" reports the creation date incorrectly on symlinks. It reports as the creation date of each symlink, the modification time of its directory. Thus, if I "touch foo" in some directory, a subsequent "ls -l" will report the identical creation time for both foo and all the symlinks in the directory. Therefore, "ls -lt" will position all the symlinks at the top. I created a perl script, using the "stat" function to report all 3 dates, atime, mtime and ctime; it correctly reports those times, in contradiction to the mtime reported by "ls -l". I had previously noted that all directories in a MSDOSFS tree carry as their creation date, the current moment. Somebody suggested that this was a capricious choice, in view of the impossibility of duplicating the creation date which DOS would report. I wonder if there is a link between these two bugs. Chuck Bacon -- crtb@helix.nih.gov
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