I did a (full) dump and restore to re-create
my partition on a new disk and was a little
surprised at the following observation.
symlinks had the timestamp of
restored (i.e., newly created on the
new disk) rather than
the old time when they were created.
This is not a big deal mostly, however
when I did
ls -ltr
to look at the directory contents, it was
a little disturbing to see a different listing
on the old partition and the new partition.
I am not sure if the old (BSD?) dump/restore
had the same tendency to give the timestamp
of the restoration time to symlinks instead
of the original time of creation.
(I no longer maintain BSD-ish machines although
I used to support sunos 4.1.x series for quite some time. But I don't recall this problem.
It may be that I simply didn't bother to run
ls -ltr or whatever to see if there were
any differences in the old and new filesystem
image.)
Anyway, if the change is unlikly to break
the existing scripts, etc., it might be
a good idea to
restore/create the symlinks with the original
date instead of the restoration time.
Just a thought.
TIA
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In UNIX symlinks are special. They have no permission bits (mode is forced to 777), and there is no way to change their timestamp (utimes() does not work on symlinks and there is no lutimes() syscall).
I am quite sure that BSD systems behave the same.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Hi,
Thank you for maintaining the package.
I did a (full) dump and restore to re-create
my partition on a new disk and was a little
surprised at the following observation.
symlinks had the timestamp of
restored (i.e., newly created on the
new disk) rather than
the old time when they were created.
This is not a big deal mostly, however
when I did
ls -ltr
to look at the directory contents, it was
a little disturbing to see a different listing
on the old partition and the new partition.
I am not sure if the old (BSD?) dump/restore
had the same tendency to give the timestamp
of the restoration time to symlinks instead
of the original time of creation.
(I no longer maintain BSD-ish machines although
I used to support sunos 4.1.x series for quite some time. But I don't recall this problem.
It may be that I simply didn't bother to run
ls -ltr or whatever to see if there were
any differences in the old and new filesystem
image.)
Anyway, if the change is unlikly to break
the existing scripts, etc., it might be
a good idea to
restore/create the symlinks with the original
date instead of the restoration time.
Just a thought.
TIA
i found the same problem, the symbol link files are always created with 777 mode.
In UNIX symlinks are special. They have no permission bits (mode is forced to 777), and there is no way to change their timestamp (utimes() does not work on symlinks and there is no lutimes() syscall).
I am quite sure that BSD systems behave the same.