Xfce Forum

rayandrews

Member

From: Vancouver B.C. Canada

Registered: 2011-12-30

Posts: 213

thunar 'date accessed' disagrees with 'ls'

All,

Thunar and 'ls' or 'stat' agree on atimes for files, but not for directories, why is that? The times listed by Thunar seem more believable, but if the atimes are not from  wherever 'stat' gets its information, then where are they from? And what exactly does constitute an atime event for a directory anyway? Listing the contents of the dir doesn't do it, so what does? As far as 'ls -lu' is concerned, even writing a file to a dir doesn't change it's atime, yet they do change now and again.  What gives?

rayandrews

Member

From: Vancouver B.C. Canada

Registered: 2011-12-30

Posts: 213

Re: thunar 'date accessed' disagrees with 'ls'

Further to that, a reboot and restart of xfce/thunar fixes the problem, now thunar agrees with stat, however, previously, hitting the 'reload current folder' did NOT repair the listing, as I'd have expected it to, if there was obsolete information. Could this be a bug?

Spect73

Member

Registered: 2013-10-31

Posts: 17

Re: thunar 'date accessed' disagrees with 'ls'

From man 2 stat:

       Not  all  of  the  Linux file systems implement all of the time fields.
       Some file system types allow mounting in such a way  that  file  and/or
       directory  accesses do not cause an update of the st_atime field.  (See
       noatime, nodiratime, and relatime in mount(8), and related  information
       in mount(2).)  In addition, st_atime is not updated if a file is opened
       with the O_NOATIME; see open(2).

I remember reading on the Linux Kernel Mailing List a whole bunch of discussions on atime.  It appears that kernel developers and filesystem developers have different viewpoints.  So, I would guess it is normal behavior for the filesystem you are running.  A good question.  Glad you asked it.  I'll certainly hope others with more knowledge of thunar chime in.

Coordially,
Spect73

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Coordially,
Spect73

rayandrews

Member

From: Vancouver B.C. Canada

Registered: 2011-12-30

Posts: 213

Re: thunar 'date accessed' disagrees with 'ls'

Spect,

I have read a fair bit on this.  As you say, the whole subject seems to be a bit of a mess. For the record, all my FS are ext4 and I have no 'noatime' or any other such tinkerings in my fstab, it's all plain vanilla.  Anyway, the point is, that it would seem to me that Thunar should report the same as 'stat' reports, however useful or not that date is or isn't. And note that there was no issue with files, only with directories (folders, in Redmond speak),  so that would seem to be a bug.  However, it seems strange that Thunar would or even could somehow come up with some other source for atime--where would these dates/times possibly come from?--so either way, it's a mystery.

Here's a current example.

'ls -lut':                                                                       Thunar:

drwxrwxrwt  14 root 116K Dec 19 08:26 tmp/       2013-12-18 20:09:52   
drwxr-xr-x   2 root 4.0K Dec 19 08:16 bin/            2013-12-18 07:35:06
drwxr-xr-x  12 root    0 Dec 18 20:14 sys/             2013-12-18 20:06:57
drwxr-xr-x  19 root  620 Dec 18 20:14 run/           2013-12-18 20:06:57

Again, hitting the reload button does not fix it, but a reload of Thunar *does* fix it.