Timestamp of newly created file is in the future

filestimestamps

On my machine at work I experience weird timestamps of files. This is bothering me, because it messes with make.

To reproduce the issue, this suffices:

$ touch foo
$ stat -c %y foo
2014-01-31 16:38:51.000000000 +0100
$ date
Fr 31. Jan 16:14:59 CET 2014

As you can see, the file, although just created, has a timestamp that is roughly 24 minutes in the future. To be precise, it is fairly stable at 24 minutes and 8 seconds, which is 1448 seconds, to me a seemingly arbitrary number.

The same holds for directories freshly created with mkdir or simply any kind of file saving / creating stuff.

Our administrator is fairly unresponsive and didn't gave root permissions either. What might be the cause of this issue and how to deal with it, if possible without root?

Best Answer

Most likely you are on remote file system and the timestamp is generated there. To confirm that you can use either mount command and check your current directory or df .. It's advisable to use NTP to avoid that situation.

Related Solutions

Timestamp, Modification Time, and Created Time of a File in Linux

There are 3 kind of "timestamps":

Access - the last time the file was read
Modify - the last time the file was modified (content has been modified)
Change - the last time meta data of the file was changed (e.g. permissions)

To display this information, you can use stat which is part of the coreutils.

stat will show you also some more information like the device, inodes, links, etc.

Remember that this sort of information depends highly on the filesystem and mount options. For example if you mount a partition with the noatime option, no access information will be written.

A utility to change the timestamps would be touch. There are some arguments to decide which timestamp to change (e.g. -a for access time, -m for modification time) and to influence the parsing of a new given timestamp. See man touch for more details.

touch can become handy in combination with cp -u ("copy only when the SOURCE file is newer than the destination file or when the destination file is missing") or for the creation of empty marker files.

Linux – Keep same file owner for newly created files

Folder b and c are owned by user b and c. A file created by a user will belong to that user.

You can use the user permission for b and c, and the group permissions for a. If you set the SGID bit (g+s) on a folder, created files will get the group permission of that folder.

mkdir a
chown a:a a
chmod g+s a

mkdir b
chown b:a b

mkdir c
chown c:a c

(assuming all users are in a group of the same name.)

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Timestamp, Modification Time, and Created Time of a File in Linux

Linux – Keep same file owner for newly created files

Related Question