From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <71765ba5c9538e6b52296854a71ea405@swtch.com>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: patch/list sorry/proc-mtime
From: "Russ Cox" <rsc@swtch.com>
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 09:17:05 -0500
In-Reply-To: <509071940603300542v4d79c76pa797c8d73a3cfd5d@mail.gmail.com>
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> if we're interested in coming to consensus, i'll pipe up and say i
> really like the idea of mtime being proc start time. i've wanted this
> many times and only didn't add it because i (foolishly) assumed it'd
> be more involved than the apparently-trivial diff. being able to 'ls
> -lt /proc' is genuinely useful, and i'm curious why you'd dismiss it.
> as you say, the compile time of the kernel is useful (and not really
> confusing) as well, but is preserved in nearly every other device on
> the system.

it duplicates information already in the status file,
and it would be the *only* kernel device file in the system
that didn't use kerndate as the mtime.  when did the
plan 9 approach become "there's more than one way to do it"?

ls -t /proc is of course indistinguishable from ls | sort -n.

ls -lt /proc just gives you some dates in sorted order.
it's useless unless you somehow have the pid->process info
mapping stored in your head.

if you want to change ps(1) to *display* the start time
of a process, i think that could be genuinely useful.
putting an extra copy on the directory mtime is not.

russ