* On Mon, Feb 22 2010, John Jobson via RT wrote:
Show quoted text> Hi,
>
> When checking files it creates $filename.attribute files all over the
> system and never delete them, i checked one dir by timeout and it
> created millions of files .attribute.attribute....
Yeah, I guess the documentation isn't entirely clear about this. There
are two factors at work here -- the first is that most OSes don't record
file creation time, so we have to keep our own state; and the second is
that originally, File::CreationTime directly stored its state in
extended filesystem attributes. Since not all platforms and filesystems
had this ability, I wrote File::Attributes and made this module use
that. File::Attributes will emulate extended filesystem attributes when
they are not naively available, which is what happened in your case.
(In practice, I actually ended up liking the "emulation" better than the
real thing. Easier to edit the attributes as a text file in Emacs
rather than individually via the command-line tools.)
So there are three solutions to your problem:
* use an OS that supports file creation time natively (OS X does)
* use an OS/filesystem that supports extended filesystem attributes
* don't worry about creation time (perhaps mtime is good enough)?
If you have other ideas, please let me know. A doc patch would be most
welcome!
Regards,
Jonathan Rockway
--
print just => another => perl => hacker => if $,=$"
RT for rt.cpan.org