21. More About Managing Files

Contents:
A Grab-Bag
A Better Place for Temporary Files: /tmp
Unique Names for Temporary Files
Why Both /tmp and /usr/tmp?
What Good Is a File's Last Access Time?
A File's Inode Change (not "Creation"!) Time
Setting File Modification Time with touch
The MAILCHECK and mail Variables Check More than Mail
Keep File Printouts Up-to-Date Automatically with make
Keep a Directory Listing at Top of the Screen: dirtop
Safer Removing, Moving, and Copying
Copying Files to a Directory
Read an Inode with stat
Automatically Appending the Date to a Filename

21.1 A Grab-Bag

Let's face it, even in a book as loosely structured as this one, there are things that don't quite fit. This chapter gave us a place to say a few things about files that we just didn't manage to cover anywhere else.

The chapter is short, and it's late, so I'm not even going to bother with the summary I might otherwise attempt in a situation like this. Just dive in.

- TOR