2008/12/8 William L. Maltby <CentOS4Bill at triad.rr.com>: > In reality, being raised on real UNIX(TM) systems from long ago and far > away, it was just one of the things we wanted left unchanged when we did > backups or shipped tapes to the outside world (one of my many jobs back > then). There is the possibility that atime was tracked "because we can". I've been there too. My first UNIX account was on a Vax 750 running BSD 4.2 in 1986, which after a year I started to manage (that's why I said that dump/restore "are so '80's" :). Times changed. I believe the reasoning which says that atime is a waste of time (pun intended :). Move on. Cheers, --Amos