Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!uwvax!astroatc!nicmad!madnix!jason
From: jason@madnix.UUCP (Jason Blochowiak)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Directory modification dates (was Re: GSOS & Proline)
Summary: Technical question
Keywords: GS/OS, directories, APW
Message-ID: <683@madnix.UUCP>
Date: 9 Jun 89 07:02:33 GMT
References: <8906040416.AA09109@crash.cts.com> <32248@apple.Apple.COM>
Reply-To: jason@madnix.UUCP (Jason Blochowiak)
Organization: ARP Software, Madison, WI
Lines: 26

In article <32248@apple.Apple.COM> dlyons@Apple.COM (David Lyons) writes:
> [...]  Another approach would be to do something similar
>to what the Font Manager does with FONT.LISTS--keep a pre-built list of
>the things & know when to rebuild it automatically, without opening any
>of the files (just check for changes in name or last-mod date for all the
>files in the directory).
	Is it safe &&/|| reasonable to check the modification date of the
parent directory (to find out if anything's changed)? It would seem that
this would be significantly quicker vs. file checking when there weren't
any changes (which it's assumed would be most of the time). I was thinking
about doing something like NCD for APW (NCD is one of Peter Norton's MS-DOS
utilities that lets you change the current directory using a text
representation of the directory tree on the disk - something like what
Copy ][+ shows), and it'd be horrendously inefficient to re-read the entire
disk's directories. So, "will it always be true" that checking a directory's
modification date against something stored will guarantee that none of the
children of that directory have been changed since the stored date?

> --Dave Lyons, Apple Computer, Inc.          |   DAL Systems


-- 
_______________________________________________________________________________

    jason@madnix.UUCP, methinks.     Formerly blochowi@garfield.cs.wisc.edu
			"It beats working" - Harrison Ford