Access Time (atime)
A file's access time identifies when the file was most recently opened for reading. A running program can maintain a file as "open" for some time, so the time at which a file was opened may differ from the time data was most recently read from the file.
Access times are usually updated even if only a small portion of a large file is examined.
Because some computer configurations are much faster at reading data than at writing it, updating access times after every read operation can be very expensive. Some systems mitigate this cost by storing access times at a coarser granularity than other times; by rounding access times only to the nearest hour or day, a file which is read repeatedly in a short time frame will only need its access time updated once. Some systems also provide options to disable access time updating altogether.
Read more about this topic: MAC Times
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