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It's one of those things that you don't care about until you do. As a former sysadmin through the dotcom booms, we regularly depended on atime for identifying
by pengaru 1y ago
It's one of those things that you don't care about until you do.
As a former sysadmin through the dotcom booms, we regularly depended on atime for identifying which files are actively being used in myriad situations.
Sometimes you're just confirming a config file was actually reloaded in response to your HUP signal. Other times you're trying to find out which data files a customer's cgi-bin mess is making use of.
It's probably less relevant today where multi-user unix hosts are less common, but it was quite valuable information to maintain back then.
- __turbobrew__ 1y ago> we regularly depended on atime for identifying which files are actively being used in myriad situations You can do that with bpf tooling now, for example the `opensnoop` BCC program can capture all file opens on demand. You can also write tools which capture all POSIX IOs to specific files/directories. I can see atime sometimes being useful in some super niche use cases such as hisenbugs you cannot reproduce reliably, but I would be reaching for BPF tools first.
- homebrewer 1y agoForget bpf, Linux has the audit framework to solve exactly this problem, and it's been in heavy use for a couple of decades now https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/configure-linux-auditing-auditd https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/configure-linux-auditing-audi... https://linux-audit.com/linux-audit-framework/configuring-and-auditing-linux-systems-with-audit-daemon/ https://linux-audit.com/linux-audit-framework/configuring-an...