How to stop Dolphin from updating access times

[Moritz Petersen]

René J.V. Bertin writes:

> 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.

I understand this is a strange problem and probably a complicated 
one. I would disable atimes completely but I want to utilize them 
for an application, which is how I stumbled across this in the 
first place. In my (perhaps naive) opinion there should not be any 
reason for the file to be accessed unless I interact with it's 
content in some way. I have tested this with a few file managers 
now and have only observed the same result with konqueror.

> 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.

Done: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435341

Thank you,
Moritz