binary file compare...

[Adam Olsen]

On Apr 13, 8:39 pm, Grant Edwards <gra... at visi.com> wrote:
> On 2009-04-13, Peter Otten <__pete... at web.de> wrote:
>
> > But there's a cache. A change of file contents may go
> > undetected as long as the file stats don't change:
>
> Good point.  You can fool it if you force the stats to their
> old values after you modify a file and you don't clear the
> cache.

The timestamps stored on the filesystem (for ext3 and most other
filesystems) are fairly coarse, so it's quite possible for a check/
update/check sequence to have the same timestamp at the beginning and
end.