Tue, 13 Apr 2004
Unforseen software interactions
Just back from the Eastercon, where I had no net connectivity,
I checked my blog and to my horror saw that the cron job I'd
set up to post the hugo news looked to have gone off early.
Which is flat-out impossible. Cron is a times execution daemon
and if you tell it to move a file into a directory on April
11th, it just won't do it on the 7th.
Then I realized what had happened. I use blosxom as the weblog
software on my diary. Blosxom stamps articles with the date
and time at which the file was created or modified. The act of
moving a file from a holding directory to a live one doesn't
necessarily modify the inode (index structure in which the
file information is stored) -- it just creates a new link
pointing to it. The files modification and creation times,
which are stored in the inode, are unchanged, so when blosxom
looks them up it gets the time the file was created/changed,
not the time when it was released for publication.
So, as far as I can tell, cron worked fine, the article
appeared on the right date ... but it's still stamped with the
date on which I wrote it.
(If anyone does think the announcement below showed up
before Sunday, can you drop
me a line. If not, I think -- one source code audit later
-- this may be one for comp.risks.)
posted at: 18:56 | path: /writing | permanent link to this entry
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