Which builds preserve original timestaps on files when unpacking archives? \ VOGONS

Which builds preserve original timestaps on files when unpacking archives?

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First post, by MrFlibble

Posted on 2013-12-03, 19:45

MrFlibble Offline

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To the best of my knowledge, vanilla DOSBox sets the modify date and time of files that were unpacked from archives (e.g. when using certain types of installers or self-extracting archives) to the date and time of their creation on a local drive as determined by the host OS. This is not always useful, and DOSBox SVN Daum builds actually do preserve original date/time stamps on files in similar circumstances. However, this feature doesn't seem to be very widespread, and I know not of other third-party builds that have it. SO my question is, are there any? And also, why is this feature absent from vanilla DOSBox in the first place?

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Reply 1 of 4, by Qbix

Posted on 2013-12-03, 19:59

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You are partly correct. Those builds don't preserve the original date, they allow the original date to be set by the archive utility.
As to why it is not in the default build. I wasn't able to come up with a version of the code that worked on all OSes that dosbox supports under all circumstances.

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Reply 2 of 4, by MrFlibble

Posted on 2013-12-03, 20:16

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Well, it does seem to work reliably under Windows in the Daum Cafe builds. Anyway, are there other known builds to do this, or is it a feature specific to DOSBox SVN Daum altogether?

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Reply 3 of 4, by gulikoza

Posted on 2013-12-03, 20:40

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The patch from DAUM is here: File Timestamp (DOSBOX Windows XP+)
I'll include it if I update my build sometime 😀

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Reply 4 of 4, by Dominus

Posted on 2013-12-03, 22:27

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MrFlibble wrote:
Well, it does seem to work reliably under Windows in the Daum Cafe builds. Anyway, are there other known builds to do this, or is it a feature specific to DOSBox SVN Daum altogether?

So that's one of the big three 😀

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