File time stamp and time as printed by date showing difference
 

Hi
Please see below actions.

$ touch abcd #abcd does not exist before
$ ls -l abcd
-rw-r--r-- 1 james games 0 Apr 17 15:01 abcd
$ date
Fri Apr 17 15:39:55 IST 2015

Why is there about 38 minutes difference even though I type commands in quick succession ?

Thank you.

Like this?

Which filesytem you are using?

I'm using ext4 on a Mint version of Debian.

I wanted to ask that from OP.

Virtualised guest ?.

I found the cause of it. The home directory is getting mounted from another Linux machine X and that machine X has wrong time (behind by 38 minutes)
So the file was getting timestamp from that machine X having wrong time while date command is showing time of current machine Y.
Thanks for your replies.

On a point of curiosity?

How did /home get mounted by a different machine?
I could understand if you had ssh'd into a machine - but that wouldn't give the behaviour you got.

JeremyBoden,
I had an entry in /etc/fstab file on machine X something like below.
10.20.30.40:/NLMNT/home /home nfs defaults 0 0

So the time on this machine 10.20.30.40 was wrong.
Time on machine X is correct. But
$ touch abcd

is actually creating a file physically resident on machine 10.20.30.40 with that machine's timestamp
while date command shows current time on machine X and they differ.

Thanks - I didn't think of NFS...:doh: