chmod/chown/chgrp behavior change

[Paul FM]

Many years ago I checked and chmod only changed the MTIME of a file if 
it needed to make a change to the permissions, now the mtime is changed 
on every file (even if no change is needed).

The  -c option works as expected (only tells you if a change was needed 
to meet your command.

So is this a bug, or was it changed for a spcific reason ?

Is there a command line option to stop it from doing this?
Has this already been fixed (and I just need to update - version info 
below).

The chmod distributed with FreeBSD still works as I would expect.


Note - we found this behaviour changed when trying to figure out why our 
incremental backups are so large (it may have been changed for many years).

Thanks.



chmod --version
chmod (GNU coreutils) 8.21
Copyright (C) 2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later 
<http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Written by David MacKenzie and Jim Meyering.




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