Re: PATCH: prompt escape tests

[Dan Nelson <dnelson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In the last episode (Feb 03), Tanaka Akira said:
> In article <200002020834.JAA09905@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
>   Sven Wischnowsky <wischnow@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> 
> > I wanted to mention that again anyway... A collegue noticed this
> > for some newer Solaris version, too: nowadays some systems don't
> > update the atime inode field anymore when a file is read, which
> > makes the -N condition test fail.
>
> This problem is not Solaris specific and can be reproduced on Linux.
> I think it is caused by NFS.

I think it's a POSIX requirement that atime must be updated.
 
Lots of unixes do let let you disable atime updates though (usually by
mount -o noatime).  It's useful for news servers or FTP archives that
do a lot of reading and don't really care about the atime field.  I
looked on my Solaris 2.6 box and there doesn't seem to be a way to
disable atime updates.  7 or 8 might very well be able to, though.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@xxxxxxxxxxxx