On Wed, 2 Jan 2019, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>On Tue, Jan 01, 2019 at 09:13:31AM -0700, Marvin Jones wrote:
>> On Tue, 1 Jan 2019, E. Liddell wrote:
>> >
>> >The governing file seems to be
>> >.trinity/share/apps/kdesktop/IconPositions .
>> >Maybe editing that and then locking it so that it can't
>> >be written, assuming that doesn't cause TDE to fail to start?
>>
>> hmmmm....
>> Considering what's in there, why would that file's timestamp have
>> been updated to the time I powered on and rebooted this A.M.?
>
>Which time stamps? Linux file systems generally record *three* time
>stamps for each file:
>
>atime, ctime and mtime

Plain ol'  ls -ol

 |jonesy@nix5:~/.trinity/share/apps/kdesktop$ ls -ol IconPositions
 |-rw------- 1 jonesy 4303 Jan  1 07:16 IconPositions

... which, as I've always understood it, is the mtime.

Here is the atime:

 |$ ls -lu IconPositions
 |-rw------- 1 jonesy jonesy 4303 Jan  1 09:02 IconPositions

Ahhh, here is the ctime:

 |$ ls -lc IconPositions
 |-rw------- 1 jonesy jonesy 4303 Jan  1 07:16 IconPositions

Maybe the file is recreated afresh from another source each time
Trinity is started?

When I right-click on the desktop and [Refresh Desktop] the atime
does not change.  Would've thought....

Jonesy