Use Lstat instead of Stat?

[deitch]

Any thoughts on using os.Lstat instead of os.Stat? Stat tries to follow symlinks, giving the information about the target, as opposed to the file itself. This means:

• you miss info about the link
• if the target doesn't exist, error

Or maybe have it as an option?

[djherbis]

What about using times.Get after os.Lstat?

fi, _ := os.Lstat("myfile")
times.Get(fi)

That being said, adding Lstat directly as well sounds like a reasonable ask to me too.

[deitch]

Drat. I missed that in the docs. (facepalm)

Thanks @djherbis

[djherbis]

One thing to note, times.Get returns only those times that can be obtained by reading the FileInfo object.

times.Stat is allowed to do 'extra work' to fetch more times if possible.
I've only used this for Windows ctime so far, but if you're looking for that we'd need to add times.Lstat.

[deitch]

Ah, it is specifically ctime and atime that I am looking for.

For now, I am ok with just those 2 and just on linux and darwin, so I build my own 2 files. In doing so, I stumbled across your excellent library.

[djherbis]

Yeah ctime should work with Get for linux and darwin, only Windows requires an extra syscall to grab it.

I'll add an Lstat method later to make it the same as Stat.

[djherbis]

As a heads up, I added support for times.Lstat a week ago, but I'm waiting on approval to push it.

[deitch]

Works like a charm. Thank you!