From 662b3e58619f74e70d7ff4fde1d5336bec951103 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Lucas Werkmeister Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2018 08:19:09 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] man: document meaning of age in tmpfiles.d (#8092) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit This documents how the age of a file is determined, which previously was only alluded to in other parts of the documentation. Fixes #8091. The phrasings of “last modification timestamp” etc. are taken from man:inode(7) (as of man-pages 4.14). The debug messages in tmpfiles.c use different messages (“modify time”), which according to a code comment follow man:stat(1); however, my copy of that manpage (from GNU coreutils 8.29) documents %y as “time of last data modification” instead. --- man/tmpfiles.d.xml | 7 +++++++ 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+) diff --git a/man/tmpfiles.d.xml b/man/tmpfiles.d.xml index c3a43d36e4..7341495b1d 100644 --- a/man/tmpfiles.d.xml +++ b/man/tmpfiles.d.xml @@ -579,6 +579,13 @@ r! /tmp/.X[0-9]*-lock ~, the clean-up is only applied to files and directories one level inside the directory specified, but not the files and directories immediately inside it. + + The age of a file system entry is determined from its last + modification timestamp (mtime), its last access timestamp (atime), + and (except for directories) its last status change timestamp + (ctime). Any of these three (or two) values will prevent cleanup + if it is more recent than the current time minus the age + field.