gregjohn wrote:
> I'm an electronic packrat.  One of the things I've collected is every povray SDL
> I've ever done, and I think it's incredibly cool that I still have their
> original creation dates associated with the file.
> 
> One day, for some reason,  some linux application was resetting the created date
> to the current date when I copied the files from one directory or media to
> another. I was ticked.  I immediately went to complain and ask how to opt-out
> of this behavior in the IRC channel for that app.  The one person there, to the
> best of my knowledge, fully understood what I was complaining about and implied
> I was silly for not wanting it to be that way.  He or she defended the idea
> that every time you copied a file, the only date that ever mattered would be
> the date-of-copy-to-new-folder.  Asinine!  And a radical change from how
> computing has always worked.  (FWIW, my linux system was only engaging in that
> behavior for a short time: it's not typical of how linux has worked for me.)

There's a reason why files (in Windows, at least) have the 'created 
date' and 'modified date' properties.  Unfortunately, some applications 
(including explorer, depending on how you do things) treat 
copying/moving as creating a new file and slap the current date on the 
thing; annoying when you want to see for laughs what your oldest files 
are.  The samba-driven network drive enclosure I once tried reset all 
the filedates on a large set of multimedia, before I had indexed when 
I'd originally got them, thereby mucking up my data in the here-and-now 
when I *have* finished indexing things and have a 'episodes/movies 
acquired in a particular month' bit on my spreadsheet.  Grr.

-- 
Tim Cook
http://empyrean.digitalartsuk.com

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