Changing File's last modified without closing it?

Please keep in mind that the behaviour you see is highly dependend on OS and perhaps file system type. Hence, java can not and does not specify when file times are updated. Therefore, no , there is no portable way to do that in java.

Thats Fair.! I remember, the native Filesystem is the one who finally decides when to write the file/ change the modified date.. Hmmm.. – raj Apr 19 at 9:57.

Depending on what you actually want to achieve one of two methods may be appropriate: use File.setLastModified() to directly manipulate the timestampe or use f.flush() to ensure all data written is actually written to the disk. Note that the OS and/or the file system may have a lower resolution of that timestamp than you hope for. For example FAT stores those timestamps with a 2-second resolution!

Even more modern file systems are known to store only in a single-second resolution. Also note that the behavior of the last modified timestamp varies a lot depending on the OS. On my Ubuntu, for example, only the write/flush modifies the timestamp, the close() doesn't!

1 Not only that - recently I watched a program that wrote a multi-MB file under Windows7 to an NTFS partition - yet it appeared to be 0 bytes long until the program finished. – Ingo Apr 19 at 9:55 Edited my code.. added the setLastModified.. when I use that function when the file is open, the method returns false. – raj Apr 19 at 9:55 1 @raj: Windows has traditionally had a very single-process view on editing files: as long as one process has a file open it's pretty much unusable for others.

This seems to extend to the timestamps as well. Note that as far as I know there is a way to open files non-blockingly in Windows, it's just not common (and probably not easily accessible from Java). – Joachim Sauer Apr 19 at 9:59.

Edited my code.. added the setLastModified.. when I use that function when the file is open, the method returns false. – raj Apr 19 at 9:56 It is working OK on OSX 10.6. – KDM Apr 19 at 10:02 As Joachim and Ingo rightly pointed out, Its really OS/ Filesystem dependent. – raj Apr 19 at 10:04.

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