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Re: ctime: creation or change time?


Corinna Vinschen wrote:
On Mar 2 13:19, eric@melski.net wrote:

In fact, NTFS has no notion of file change time as described in POSIX.  Is there
any chance of undoing this change?  An alternative solution might be to simply
use the NTFS file modify time for both the mtime and ctime of the file, since
those two are almost always updated together anyway.


Well, we're trying to be POSIX like, so that's nothing we're going to
revert.  I guess we're using ctime as change time even more in future.

I understand that you're trying to be POSIX-like, but I wonder if doing so at the cost of compatibility with the host OS is wise. To be sure, the implementation you have chosen will break some Windows applications.


It seems to me that ultimately you are emulating POSIX-like behavior on top of what is fundamentally NOT a POSIX-like system. If that is so, then why not use a different implementation that is sure not to break existing non-Cygwin Windows applications? The proposal I made previously (report Windows modify time as both Cygwin mtime and ctime) would give Cygwin applications a reasonable approximation of ctime in the POSIX sense, while retaining a correct value of creation time for Windows applications.

Thanks,

Eric Melski


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