Re: autorevert.el

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2004 20:44:46 -0600 (CST)
> From: Luc Teirlinck <address@hidden>
> 
>    How about checking the directory size as well?  That could work for MS
>    filesystems as well, if `stat' does a good job of reporting the
>    directory size (in the MS-DOS port, it does).
> 
> You mean (nth 7 (file-attributes dirname))?

Yes.

> Somehow does not seem to work (on GNU/Linux).  It returns 4096 for
> all empty to medium size directories.

That's expected: a directory's file grows very slowly, since each
entry takes up a small number of bytes, so another 4K block will be
allocated only after lots of files are added.  But that doesn't mean
it's not an indication of a change.

> In other words, it is useless for our purposes.

I'm at a loss how you arrived at that conclusion, especially since I
suggested looking at the size for the benefit of systems that cannot
use the time stamp.  Isn't this better than not knowing the directory
changed at all?