The Old New Thing

How do I access a file without updating its last-access time?

October 10, 2011 Oct 10, 2011 10/10/11

Raymond Chen

The first problem with discussing file last-access time is agreeing what you mean by a file's last-access time. The file system folks have one definition of the file last-access time, namely the time the file was most recently opened and either read from or written to. This is the value retrieved by functions like , , and . The problem ...