Hello, is modified? a good and secure way to evaluate when synchronizing files? Did you ever encounter any problems with modified? ? Thanks Max
Four problems with modified?: You may get false hits:: a file's contents may not have changed, but its date may have (perhaps if it has been copied from somewhere else, or restored from a backup); Time sequence is not reliable: clocks can be set differently on different machines, or reset on one machine (think when daylight saving kicks in) so you cannot assume that the file with a later timestamp is the later version. All you can assume is that the file may have changed; Same timestamp may hide a file change: you'd be very unlucky for this to happen, but it is a theoretical possibility. Imagine you change a file around the same time the time is reset on the computer. The newer file may just (one in a million chance) get saved back with the same timestamp; Timestamps can be falsified: using utilities, the timestamp could be set to any value. I have one application where I need to sync files. That's when we upload new CGI scripts to REBOL.org. We don't use modified? for that. Instead, we check if a checksum/secure has changed. That works in our case because the files are small, so generating 500 or so checksums takes just a few moments.
False hits is the main problem for me, even looking a file can produce a change in modifying timestamp.