Archive bits and ability to lock access time in AIX 4.x.x??

[andyc333]

Hey all,

I was wondering if in AIX 4.2.1 and 4.3.3 if there is such a thing as an archive bit in the JFS filesystem? I know that newer releases of AIX (and JFS) have this but I'm not sure if there is for older versions.

Also is there is a way to preserve the "access time" in the inode table on these versions of the OS? We want to be able to know when a file was last accessed but everytime we do a weekly backup, we're accessing all the files. We'd like to be able to know if a file that hasn't been used in more than 3 months so we can remove it.

Thanks,
andyc333

 

[sushveer]

Hi Andy

I wrote a script using following command to remove files
3 months older :
# find /Dir -atime +90 -exec rm {} \;

# find /dir -mtime +90 -exec rm {} \;

a flag for accessed file

m for modified file

This worked fine for my purpose...

sushveer
IBM certified specialist-p-series AIX5L System Administration
AIX/SOLARIS/WEBSPHERE-MQ/TIVOLI Administrator

 

[andyc333]

Thanks sushveer. I have something similar to that but the problem is when we perform backups, via tar/cp -r/commercial products the access time gets updated. We have to do a weekly full backup (and daily incrementals) due to the large amount of data we have (3+ TB). So now you can see our dilema. We can't use the find -atime to really know when the last time a user accessed a file since our backup tools always change that access time.

You wouldn't happen to know another solution? We were thinking of writing a wrapper to save all the file attributes (via istat) and then run the backup and then run a script to restore the times via "touch". But with 3+ TB of data the save/restore wrapper would take way too long.

Thanks,
andy

 

[mrn]

This may help

http://unix.about.com/library/weekly/aa022601e.htm

--
| Mike Nixon
| Unix Admin
|
----------------------------

 

[Ygor]

#!/usr/bin/ksh

#---define a file to compare against
STAMP=/etc/timestamp #---or whatever

#----get list of files modified since previous run
LIST=`find . -type f -newer $STAMP -print`

#----preserve file access times for all files in $LIST
#----also update the last modification date for $STAMP
#----note: I'm using perl to stat the files, but you could use istat
perl -e '
while($file = shift) {
($ss, $mm, $hh, $DD, $MM, $YY) = localtime(scalar((stat($file))[8]));
printf "%s %04d%02d%02d%02d%02d\n", $file, $YY + 1900, $MM + 1, $DD, $hh, $mm
}' $LIST > $STAMP

#----backup commands using $LIST would go here

#---restore file access times
while read FILENAME FILESTAMP
do
touch -a $FILESTAMP $FILENAME
done < $STAMP

#----don't delete $STAMP file so that it exists for the next run


PS. If you want to do a complete weekly backup then
touch 197001010000 $STAMP

 

[andyc333]

Thanks Ygor! Now I don't have to waste time coming up with a wrapper of my own.

Andy