• Jan Kara's avatar
    ext2: Do not update mtime of a moved directory · 39fe7557
    Jan Kara authored
    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: <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>
    39fe7557
ext2.h 6.32 KB