2011/6/2 Kenneth Loafman <address@hidden>:
> All UNIX backup programs use modtime to check for changes, so I'm not sure
> this would be widely used. In my opinion, the program that modified the
> modtime should get a bug report. That's just not the way things are done
> in the real world.
For the case in question, shouldn't it be possible to detect the
change in ctime? I believe that changing the mtime back to the old
value (which is an option in many tagging tools) still always causes
an updated ctime. I know that at least dar ("disk archiver") checks
ctime rather than mtime.
ctime tells you when the file was created, mtime tells you when it was
last modified, so checking ctime would be useless except to see if the
file was created after the last backup. mtime would also tell you if
the file was modified after the last backup since it should be >=
ctime. ctime should not be changed once the file is created.
...Ken