From: Paul Lutus <nospam@...>
Date: 2006-09-03T11:05:27+09:00
Subject: Re: File.ctime for detecting directory modifications?

Garance A Drosehn wrote:

/ ...

> I expect your trick would work in very many situations, but there
> are some uncommon situations where the trick might not work.
> This is particularly likely if dealing with distributed filesystems like
> NFS or AFS, or if the path you are checking is in some kind of
> "union" filesystem.  The trick might even work in those situations,
> but I can also imagine that it might not.

Yes, I agree. I thought I would add something I remember from NFS (or
perhaps its predecessor filesystem FAT32) -- it registers file times with a
granularity of 2 seconds, not 1 as you might expect. This made me
absolutely crazy when I tried to synchronize a directory on a Windows
machine from a Linux one -- the synchronization kept repeating itself
because the times refused to match up. I finally realized Windows wasn't
playing with a full deck.

-- 
Paul Lutus
http://www.arachnoid.com