On 9/2/06, Paul Lutus <nospam / nosite.zzz> wrote:
> Garance A Drosehn wrote:
>
> / ...
>
> > I expect your trick would work in very many situations, but there
> > are some uncommon situations where the trick might not work.
> > This is particularly likely if dealing with distributed filesystems like
> > NFS or AFS, or if the path you are checking is in some kind of
> > "union" filesystem.  The trick might even work in those situations,
> > but I can also imagine that it might not.
>
> Yes, I agree. I thought I would add something I remember from NFS (or
> perhaps its predecessor filesystem FAT32) -- it registers file times with a
> granularity of 2 seconds, not 1 as you might expect. This made me
> absolutely crazy when I tried to synchronize a directory on a Windows
> machine from a Linux one -- the synchronization kept repeating itself
> because the times refused to match up. I finally realized Windows wasn't
> playing with a full deck.

And note that you can mount various types of windows file systems in
Linux either directly or via samba.

Some of those actually let you do useful things with them. <G>


-- 
Rick DeNatale

My blog on Ruby
http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/