[NTLUG:Discuss] original file creation date?

[Kenneth Loafman]

Eric Schnoebelen wrote:
> 
> Which programs?  I'd like to take a look at their source, and
> see what they are doing.

gnome-volume-manager-gthumb

> However, having worked for various UNIX OS vendors over the
> years, and having maintained/enhanced core backup/recovery
> utilities such as dump(8) and restore(8), I've not seen any
> utility that can modify the inode creation time.
> 
> - On another note, I think the semantics of cp have changed in the
> - last few years, and not to the better.  It used to be that cp as
> - root would automatically imply --preserve.  Now it does not.
> - Not a good change.
> 
> ``--preserve'' is a GNU-ism, and didn't exist in the historic
> edition of cp(1). (even -r/-p didn't exist until cp(1) was over 15
> years old.)

--preserve is the long form of -p.

We had -p on Convex UNIX back in 1985 and the root user assumed -p.
Going back before that, I just don't remember.  Worked on too many
different systems before that.

> I would suspect the developers of the GNU version changed the
> semantics to better follow the POSIX.2 standards at some point.
> (gack, the number of options cp(1) has grown as part of GNU's
> coreutils!)

Almost as bad as 'ls', but not quite...

...Ken