CODEWITHSUNDEEP
clinuxcommand-linesymlink
Genelia D'souza
Genelia D'souza

Reputation: 125

softlinks atime and mtime modification

Is it possible to change the atime and mtime of a symlink?

I am trying to change it using the utime() function(C code) but instead it changes the time of destination files.

Also if I do 

cp -dpr <src fldr> <<dest folder> (command line)

[The src folder contains different symlinks.] the symlinks at destination are created with current timestamp.

Doing a stat() on the symlink will give me the timing of destination file (in C code) but if we fire a stat command on command line it gives the timestamp of link(possibly it is using lstat)

Any ideas?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1090

Answers (2)

Paul
Paul

Reputation: 141877

You can use touch with the -h flag in bash to modify the mtime and atime of the symlink instead of the file it references:

touch -h somesymlink

You can use the -t flag to specify a time to set it to, if you don't want to use the current time.

Upvotes: 3

Niklas Hansson
Niklas Hansson

Reputation: 473

Use lutimes instead. See man lutimes or http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/File-Times.html

Upvotes: 1

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