0

I have mounted ext4 partition in Ubuntu 20.04 with noatime mount option in my /etc/fstab

From stat: Access time doesn't change when the file is opened on the editor or modified and saved, while modification time changes. Even when the file is repeatedly modified and saved, closed and saved the Access time doesn't change.

So, when does Access time change in noatime mounted partition? Does it ever change? Does it represent the creation time (in noatime) or when it was copied to the partition?

Porcupine
  • 1,680
  • 2
  • 19
  • 45
  • The noatime option fully disables writing file access times to the drive every time you read a file. This works well for almost all applications, except for those that need to know if a file has been read since the last time it was modified. The write time information to a file will continue to be updated anytime the file is written to with this option enabled. – Artem S. Tashkinov Mar 20 '21 at 21:47

1 Answers1

1

noatime switches off updating access time automatically. The access time for each file will be initialised at creation, or if the file system was previously mounted without the noatime flag then whatever access time was on existing files will not be changed.

Theoretically you can still change a file's access time manually with the touch command if you really wanted to.

Philip Couling
  • 17,591
  • 5
  • 42
  • 82