Each file has three time stamps associated with it: its access time,
its modification time, and its attribute modification time. These
correspond to the st_atime
, st_mtime
, and st_ctime
members of the stat
structure; see section File Attributes.
All of these times are represented in calendar time format, as
time_t
objects. This data type is defined in `time.h'.
For more information about representation and manipulation of time
values, see section Calendar Time.
Reading from a file updates its access time attribute, and writing updates its modification time. When a file is created, all three time stamps for that file are set to the current time. In addition, the attribute change time and modification time fields of the directory that contains the new entry are updated.
Adding a new name for a file with the link
function updates the
attribute change time field of the file being linked, and both the
attribute change time and modification time fields of the directory
containing the new name. These same fields are affected if a file name
is deleted with unlink
, remove
or rmdir
. Renaming
a file with rename
affects only the attribute change time and
modification time fields of the two parent directories involved, and not
the times for the file being renamed.
Changing the attributes of a file (for example, with chmod
)
updates its attribute change time field.
You can also change some of the time stamps of a file explicitly using
the utime
function--all except the attribute change time. You
need to include the header file `utime.h' to use this facility.
utimbuf
structure is used with the utime
function to
specify new access and modification times for a file. It contains the
following members:
time_t actime
time_t modtime
If times is a null pointer, then the access and modification times
of the file are set to the current time. Otherwise, they are set to the
values from the actime
and modtime
members (respectively)
of the utimbuf
structure pointed to by times.
The attribute modification time for the file is set to the current time in either case (since changing the time stamps is itself a modification of the file attributes).
The utime
function returns 0
if successful and -1
on failure. In addition to the usual file name errors
(see section File Name Errors), the following errno
error conditions
are defined for this function:
EACCES
ENOENT
EPERM
EROFS
Each of the three time stamps has a corresponding microsecond part,
which extends its resolution. These fields are called
st_atime_usec
, st_mtime_usec
, and st_ctime_usec
;
each has a value between 0 and 999,999, which indicates the time in
microseconds. They correspond to the tv_usec
field of a
timeval
structure; see section High-Resolution Calendar.
The utimes
function is like utime
, but also lets you specify
the fractional part of the file times. The prototype for this function is
in the header file `sys/time.h'.
tvp[0]
, and the new modification time by
tvp[1]
. This function comes from BSD.
The return values and error conditions are the same as for the utime
function.
Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.