Re: stat: reading btime on linux via statx

[Martin Bukatovic]

On Sat, Mar 02, 2019 at 08:03:45PM -0800, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> Thanks for the patch and your patience.
> I'm going to add the attached in the upcoming release.
> I've adjusted slightly to handle symlinks,
> and to test (st_mask & STATX_BTIME) on output.
> 
> Ideally we would only call statx() rather than stat() as well,
> though for now the performance implications of that aren't
> worth complicating things.

Thanks for considering and polishing the patch for the release. At first
I wasn't expecting that coreutils will be willing to accept this instead
of the ideal solution you describe. But I agree that this simple
approach is good enough from practical point of view.

Besides adding some statx compat wrapper to gnulib (as suggested by Eric
Blake), so that such wrapper would work on systems without statx(2) as
well, there is lot of room in tools which uses it. Eg. stat would be
able to ask only for fields which one specifies via --format, but such
ability seems to be more practical for ls.

-- 
Martin Bukatovič