utime

[Ben Pfaff]

Joe Glass <joe@glass.cl.msu.edu> writes:

> Does anyone know how to use the utime function or a similar method (in
> Perl) to set the mtime and atime of a symbolic link?  Whenever I try to
> change the time of a symbolic link, it changes the time of the actual
> file that the link is linked to.  

You can't change the atime of any file, except to the current
time.  From the GNU libc manual:

 - Function: int utime (const char *FILENAME, const struct utimbuf
          *TIMES)

[....]

     The attribute modification time for the file is set to the current
     time in either case (since changing the time stamps is itself a
     modification of the file attributes).

And I don't think you can change the times of a symlink at all.
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