utimes (2)
Leading comments
Copyright (c) 1992 Drew Eckhardt (drew@cs.colorado.edu), March 28, 1992 %%%LICENSE_START(VERBATIM) Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical t...
NAME
utime, utimes - change file last access and modification timesSYNOPSIS
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <utime.h> int utime(const char *filename, const struct utimbuf *times); #include <sys/time.h> int utimes(const char *filename, const struct timeval times[2]);
DESCRIPTION
Note: modern applications may prefer to use the interfaces described in utimensat(2).The utime() system call changes the access and modification times of the inode specified by filename to the actime and modtime fields of times respectively.
If times is NULL, then the access and modification times of the file are set to the current time.
Changing timestamps is permitted when: either the process has appropriate privileges, or the effective user ID equals the user ID of the file, or times is NULL and the process has write permission for the file.
The utimbuf structure is:
struct utimbuf {
time_t actime; /* access time */
time_t modtime; /* modification time */
};
The utime() system call allows specification of timestamps with a resolution of 1 second.
The utimes() system call is similar, but the times argument refers to an array rather than a structure. The elements of this array are timeval structures, which allow a precision of 1 microsecond for specifying timestamps. The timeval structure is:
struct timeval {
long tv_sec; /* seconds */
long tv_usec; /* microseconds */
};
times[0] specifies the new access time, and times[1] specifies the new modification time. If times is NULL, then analogously to utime(), the access and modification times of the file are set to the current time.
RETURN VALUE
On success, zero is returned. On error, -1 is returned, and errno is set appropriately.ERRORS
- EACCES
- Search permission is denied for one of the directories in the path prefix of path (see also path_resolution(7)).
- EACCES
- times is NULL, the caller's effective user ID does not match the owner of the file, the caller does not have write access to the file, and the caller is not privileged (Linux: does not have either the CAP_DAC_OVERRIDE or the CAP_FOWNER capability).
- ENOENT
- filename does not exist.
- EPERM
- times is not NULL, the caller's effective UID does not match the owner of the file, and the caller is not privileged (Linux: does not have the CAP_FOWNER capability).
- EROFS
- path resides on a read-only filesystem.
CONFORMING TO
utime(): SVr4, POSIX.1-2001. POSIX.1-2008 marks utime() as obsolete.utimes(): 4.3BSD, POSIX.1-2001.