Re: touch (4.5.3) does not update modification time

[James Youngman]

On 6/5/07, Tom Jones <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm using touch V4.5.3 on Linux

You might want to consider using a modern version; see
http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/

> and it doesn't seem to update the
> modification time - or rather it updates it to 4-7s ago which won't work
> for me since I'm using it to touch a dummy object for make.

The most likely explanation is that you are using NFS and your NFS
client and server have system clocks that are out of sync.    But you
didn't provide enough information with your question for us to be
certain that this is the case.


> $ date;touch dummy;date;ls -lt
> Tue Jun  5 14:52:37 PDT 2007
> Tue Jun  5 14:52:37 PDT 2007
> total 552
> ...
> -rw-r--r--    1 tjones   hardware        0 Jun  5 14:45 dummy
> ...
>
> I have worked around the problem by always doing 'touch -m'
>
> I couldn't find this in the archive and I can't tell if it is a
> duplicate of
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-fileutils/2001-01/msg00032.html

I don't think that is describing the same thing.

James.