"Jonathan S. Shapiro" <shap@eros-os.org> writes:
> > By the principle of using available information efficiently, I'd
> > prefer to just set the local working file and its text-base
> > doppelganger to have the same timestamp, and then compare those.
>
> Not all filesystems timestamps are recorded with the same resolution or
> accuracy, and clocks drift at different rates under different OS's. The
> comparison may need to be fuzzy, which would seem to defeat it's purpose.
Well, clock drift and/or timestamp resolution (as long as it's within
a second or so) wouldn't matter -- we're not comparing time across two
machines, nor are we even comparing a file's timestamp with the system
clock. Instead, we'd be comparing the timestamps of two files, whose
timestamps had earlier been explicitly set to be the same.
But recording a discovered timestamp and comparing those two is
probably going to be more reliable than trying to set timestamps
portably.
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:08 2006