Re: date problem with ls -la --time=ctime

[Rainer Traut <tr ml gmx de>]

John Haxby wrote:

> There are three timestamps maintained for files: mtime (modification 
> time), atime (access time) and ctime (change time).  ctime differs from 
> mtime in that it records a change to the file that doesn't involve 
> changing the files contents; chmod, chown, etc affect this.
>
> If you want to delete files in /tmp that haven't been accessed (atime, 
> ie read) in the last 15 minutes then
>
>    find /tmp -type f -amin +15 | xargs rm -f
>
> That's going to annoy some people if they're expecting files to hang 
> around in /tmp for any length of time, so this is probably better
>
>    find /tmp -type f -user notes -amin +15 |  grep '^/tmp/eo-[^/]*tm$'  
> | xargs rm -f
>
> which will restrict the files to those owned by "notes" and, further, 
> those that match a specific pattern.   Check the find(1) man page to 
> make sure I've got +15 right: I always test it to make sure!

Thanks, that's what I was looking for.
It looks now this way:
find /tmp -type f -user notes -iname "eo*" -amin +15 -exec ls -la {}
--time=atime \;

But I still don't understand why the date of three days ago.
The file did not exist at that time.
I deleted all files this morning and confimed /tmp has no eo* files anymore.

Rainer