From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.78 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.9-12 i586) Description of problem: This is a feature since the man page clearly says that -H uses the file change time. However, the change time is the Wrong Time to use, since it is updated when any file attributes are changed. For instance, if the file is backed up using tar --atime-preserve, the ctime of the file becomes the time when the backup was done. Don't try to tell me this isn't BROKEN! Also, pr uses mtime (as does enscript) and the man page sort of implies that mpage should behave like pr, since this is what it uses by default under -p. Version- mpage-2.5.1-5 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Create a short text file (or use an old one lying around). Assume it is named foo.txt. 2. Change its ctime without changing mtime: chmod +x foo.txt ; chmod -x foo.txt 3. Look at ctime and mtime; they will be different. ls -lc foo.txt ; ls -l foo.txt 4. Format the file using mpage and give output a header mpage -H1 foo.txt | lpr Actual Results: The time in the output header is ctime, not mtime. Expected Results: Since mpage conforms to its man page, the expected results after reading the man page are the same as the actual results. However, the expected (and desired) results before reading the man page were that the time in the output header should be mtime. Additional info: I did not find any way to tell mpage to select mtime as an alternative to ctime. The only workaround is manually put the date in the -h header, or use -p which unfortunately also puts irrelevant "pr -l66 -w80" in the header. I would be happy with an additional command-line option to select mtime.
Created attachment 41370 [details] patches for text.c and mpage.1 to fix feature and documentation of it
I agree. Fixed in mpage-2.5.2-2.