Skip to content
Snippets Groups Projects
Commit 39fe7557 authored by Jan Kara's avatar Jan Kara Committed by Linus Torvalds
Browse files

ext2: Do not update mtime of a moved directory


One of our users is complaining that his backup tool is upset on ext2
(while it's happy on ext3, xfs, ...) because of the mtime change.

The problem is:

    mkdir foo
    mkdir bar
    mkdir foo/a

Now under ext2:
    mv foo/a foo/b

changes mtime of 'foo/a' (foo/b after the move).  That does not really
make sense and it does not happen under any other filesystem I've seen.

More complicated is:
    mv foo/a bar/a

This changes mtime of foo/a (bar/a after the move) and it makes some
sense since we had to update parent directory pointer of foo/a.  But
again, no other filesystem does this.  So after some thoughts I'd vote
for consistency and change ext2 to behave the same as other filesystems.

Do not update mtime of a moved directory.  Specs don't say anything
about it (neither that it should, nor that it should not be updated) and
other common filesystems (ext3, ext4, xfs, reiserfs, fat, ...) don't do
it.  So let's become more consistent.

Spotted by ronny.pretzsch@dfs.de, initial fix by Jörn Engel.

Reported-by: default avatar <ronny.pretzsch@dfs.de>
Cc: <hare@suse.de>
Cc: Jörn Engel <joern@logfs.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarJan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: <linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
parent 10dfb54c
No related branches found
No related tags found
No related merge requests found
Loading
0% Loading or .
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment