Disabling atime

[John Reiser]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> I'm not sure anyone has mentioned what are probably the biggest uses of
> atime:

>   (2) as an indication that files have never been used and can probably
> be deleted.   Since most backup operations act as a read, this tends to
> not be very useful.

Serious backup systems (programs designed for the purpose) save and
restore the old value of atime.  'tar' has --atime-preserve.  cpio has
--reset-access-time.

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