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The last access timestamp of my files is updated every 24 hours whenever I access an files. E.g. I type "ls" and if the last access timestamp of the file is older than 24 it is updated to the current date.

Has anyone else the same phenomenon and any idea what is causing it. I have a SSD, perhaps it is related to this.

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    Do you have an indexer running that indexes all your files for faster searching? I believe the default Ubuntu installation does this. (Not running Unity, so can't really provide an answer)
    – gertvdijk
    Jan 31, 2013 at 18:42
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    updatedb (from mlocate, installed by default) runs daily. Try either temporarily removing it or disabling /etc/cron.daily/mlocate. Jan 31, 2013 at 18:46
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    @AndreaCorbellini updatedb would only update directory timestamps, never timestamps on regular files, since it only indexes file names and not file content. Jan 31, 2013 at 19:13
  • @Gilles: you're right. Sorry! Jan 31, 2013 at 21:13
  • Does this still happens?
    – Braiam
    Jan 17, 2014 at 16:10

1 Answer 1

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If you have a SSD, the relatime mount option is automatically set. Here is what it does (source):

Relatime maintains atime data, but not for each time that a file is accessed. With this option enabled, atime data is written to the disk only if the file has been modified since the atime data was last updated (mtime), or if the file was last accessed more than a certain length of time ago (by default, one day).

Try changing relatime to noatime in your /etc/fstab file to confirm the reason for these updates.

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