bug#7184: Problems with timestamp on FAT32 directories

[Eric Blake]

On 10/10/2010 03:06 AM, Steven Lee wrote:
> On an IOMega 500 GB Home Network Hard Drive with a FAT32 partition, all
> of the directories are showing up as "1969-12-31 16:00" (or essentially
> no date), but when viewing the directory in Windows Explorer,

> Any idea what could be wrong?

There's the issue.  FAT is an inherently metadata-poor file system, 
which lacks a lot of information.  Then Windows mistakenly treats 
stat()'s ctime as creation-time instead of change-time.  Cygwin MUST 
fake timestamps for information that is not present in the native 
filesystem, so it's easier to fake the epoch (0 seconds since Jan 1 
1970, adjusted for your timezone) than it is to fake any other date.  If 
you have further questions, you should raise them with the cygwin list, 
as there is nothing that coreutils can do about the inherent lack of 
information in your filesystem nor with cygwin's choice of how to fake 
that information.

--
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org