Re: reply>> my first newbie question

Attached is a function that will return a sequence of indices into
os.fstat's return tuple that should be acceptable for use.  Let me know
if this helps, or if I'm just embarrassing myself.

On Wed, 2003-11-19 at 13:14, Jacob Smullyan wrote:
> Hi --
> 
> I believe that ctime is supposed to be change time, not creation time,
> but there is confusion about this; you'll find textbooks that talk
> about it as creation time, and others that talk about how that is a
> misunderstanding.  I'm not sure what POSIX has to say about this, or
> whether that matters, since obviously different platforms deal with it
> differently.
> 
> Perhaps we can add a configure test that checks for this and use mtime
> for platforms that give creation-time semantics for ctime.  I seem to
> recall that there was a reason ctime was preferable to use than mtime,
> but I've forgotten what it was.  Drew, do you remember our discussion
> of this back in 2001?
> 
> js
> 
> 
> On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 04:47:53PM +0100, Tomastiq wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > IMHO I've got it.
> > As I see the problem is the ctime handling.
> > In the (cygwin) documentation:
> > "ctime = time of last modification of file status information"
> > In python docs at stat() function:
> > "st_ctime (time of most recent content modification or metadata change)"
> > And skunk uses this ST_CTIME constant for checking the fresh of compiled
> > version of html. But under cygwin this kind of date contains the
> > creation date, so it is not changing. I think this is a win manner
> > and cygwin uses this date. After I changed *_CTIME constants in files
> > to *_MTIME everything is working fine. Hmm. Unfortunately I can't find
> > information about this behaviour at cygwin.com.
> > 
> > thx.toma
> > 
-- 
Adam DePrince, CSA <[email protected]>

#/usr/bin/env python
#
# 


def stat_changed():
    import tempfile
    import os
    import stat
    
    import time


    delay = 2.0
    
    filename = tempfile.mktemp()

    fh = open( filename, "w+" )
    fh.write( "something\n")
    fh.flush()

    start_stat = os.stat( filename )

    start_time = time.time()

    while time.time() < start_time + delay:
        delay = (start_time + 2 ) - time.time()
        if delay > 0 :
            time.sleep( delay )

    fh.write( "else\n" )
    fh.flush()

    end_stat = os.stat( filename )

    retval = []

    for flag in (stat.ST_CTIME, stat.ST_MTIME ):
        if (start_stat[flag] != end_stat[flag] ):
            retval.append( flag )
    fh.close()
    os.unlink( filename )
    return tuple( retval )

print stat_changed()