in reply to Building a test environment

It seems to me you have two courses of action wrt to the aging:

For the first, you could use the touch command with a certain date (in *nixes) to prematurely age the files: 
$ touch foo
$ ls -l foo
-rw-rw-r--  1 user group 0 Jun  5 09:58 foo
$ touch -t 200705050958 foo
$ ls -l foo
-rw-rw-r--  1 user group 0 May  5 09:58 foo

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For the second, is there really any difference in testing the lifespan across a month as opposed to 15 minutes?

-derby

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Re^2: Building a test environment
by Fletch (Bishop) on Jun 05, 2007 at 14:03 UTC

    Or just use the builtin utime (which coincidentally was mentioned just the other day (coincidentally also by me . . . :)).

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Re^2: Building a test environment
by talexb (Chancellor) on Jun 05, 2007 at 14:56 UTC

    Again, sorry, I didn't put all of the details into my original post because the PM server was so slow this morning.

    The timestamp on the file isn't considered -- instead I have a script that does an hourly check, comparing when the file's database record was created with the current time, and doing the appropriate aging by advancing a file to attention (after 2 days), stale (after 14 days) or deleted (after 28 days).

    I may have to write a script that 'artificially' ages files by a certain amount to get the test to work -- perhaps by back-dating some of the database fields, then running the hourly check script.

    Alex / talexb / Toronto

    "Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

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      Changing the dates in the database sounds like the best way to test it to me.
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