Xfce Forum

Pindakoe

Member

From: NL

Registered: 2003-11-26

Posts: 116

Configuration files changed/touched every time?

I run a daily backup of parts of my machine and have started work to trim down the volume of backupped data. In this process I found that (I guess) all files in ~/.config/xfce4 gets touched daily, i.e. comparing today's version with yesterday's doesn't show any difference, but the file date has changed, see output of ls -l for one file:

~/backup 08:57:03> ls -lgo
-rw-rw-r-- 1 682 2007-11-10 08:28 daily.0/tulemore/home/pindakoe/.config/xfce4/mcs_settings/orage.xml
-rw-rw-r-- 1 682 2007-11-08 19:01 daily.1/tulemore/home/pindakoe/.config/xfce4/mcs_settings/orage.xml
-rw-rw-r-- 1 682 2007-11-07 22:02 daily.2/tulemore/home/pindakoe/.config/xfce4/mcs_settings/orage.xml
-rw-rw-r-- 1 682 2007-11-06 20:11 daily.3/tulemore/home/pindakoe/.config/xfce4/mcs_settings/orage.xml
-rw-rw-r-- 1 682 2007-11-05 18:16 daily.4/tulemore/home/pindakoe/.config/xfce4/mcs_settings/orage.xml
-rw-rw-r-- 1 682 2007-11-04 21:25 daily.5/tulemore/home/pindakoe/.config/xfce4/mcs_settings/orage.xml
-rw-rw-r-- 1 682 2007-11-04 08:42 daily.6/tulemore/home/pindakoe/.config/xfce4/mcs_settings/orage.xml
-rw-rw-r-- 1 682 2007-11-03 16:14 daily.7/tulemore/home/pindakoe/.config/xfce4/mcs_settings/orage.xml

~/backup 08:59:53> diff daily.0/tulemore/home/pindakoe/.config/xfce4/mcs_settings/orage.xml daily.1/tulemore/home/pindakoe/.config/xfce4/mcs_settings/orage.xml

And diff returns no differences.

Any reason why this is happening? Note that I checked this is happening to more files than this; as far as I can see to all without making any changes. For obvious reasons I want to backup all configuration data, but backing up fresh every time seems wastefull (even though sizes are small).

Pindakoe

Member

From: NL

Registered: 2003-11-26

Posts: 116

Re: Configuration files changed/touched every time?

Nobody?

In the mean time I have formed the opinion that (most of?) these are rewritten when logging out or when making major changes, irrespective of the fact whether the individual element defined in the .rc file has changed or not.