Re: how to grep without changing timestamps?
On Tue, Jan 02, 2001 at 03:14:34AM -0500, will trillich wrote:
> > Is it possible to grep a ton of files without modifying their date/timestamps?
> > Currently if I use grep, it changes the access time of all files touched,
> > which causes mutt to lose track of the folders which have new mail (I guess it
> > looks at the timestamp last modified and last accessed to figure this out).
> > Occasionally I do want to include the mail folders in my greps, so bypassing
> > the "mail" directory is not a solution.
>
> whoa. isn't there a difference between MODIFIED and ACCESSED?
> doing "pager < file" should modify the ACCESSED timestamp,
> but not the MODIFIED timestamp, right? or am i in the wrong
> universe?
They are different. The way the quick mailcheck works I believe is that,
among other things, you check whether modify time > access time. This is
because when mail is appended to your spool file, the modify time stamp is
updated, but not the access one. The access time stamp is then modified when
you actually look at the spool file (with some sort of disk/file "read"
operation).
--
Maciej Kalisiak mac@dgp.toronto.edu www.dgp.toronto.edu/~mac
Reply to: