How to stop Dolphin from updating access times

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Saturday April 03 2021 18:29:27 Moritz Petersen wrote:
>Hello,
>
>I have noticed that whenever I view a directory in Dolphin, the 
>atimes of certain files are updated, even without me actually 
>opening any files.
>
>Which files are 'accessed' apparently depends on their 
>extensions. For example an empty .ogg file will have its atime 
>updated, while an empty .m4a file will not. I have disabled all 
>previews but that hasn't helped.
>
>Is there any way to disable this Behaviour?

This may not be within dolphin's control... mount your filesystem with noatime (and nodiratime) and the behaviour should stop completely I think (and your filesystem should become snappier). In theory the atime is updated each time a file is accessed, and there are just too many reasons that could happen (without causing any change in the file) for the info to be of any interest as far as I'm concerned.

That said, it seems weird that only some files would be affected, so you could report this on bugs.kde.org . That will bring the issue under the direct attention of the dev team and they'll tell you if there's another way than the one I mentioned to prevent it, why they can't do anything about it (if so), etc.

R.