Do you remember [this](/~mdione/glob/posts/restoring-files-owner-and-permissions/)?
Well, now I have a similar but quite different case: I want to restore the files'
times. Why? Read me out.

Since a long time I'm doing backups to an external drive. For that I simply use `rsync`.
When I bought my second laptop, I took the chance to test restoring from that
backup, so I just did a last backup in the old machine and a restore in the new one.
This allowed me to add the last few things that were missing. After a few more
weeks finding missing things, doing more backup/restore cycles between the old
and new laptops, I was happy.

But there was something that I didn't realize till a few months later. The file
times were not backed up, and clearly not restored. This didn't affect me in any
way, at least until I tried to a new post to this glob.

See, this glob is generated with [`ikiwiki`](http://ikiwiki.info/). `ikiwiki`
uses the files' mtime to generate the posts' times, and uses that to sort them
and to assign them as belonging to some year or month. With the mtimes lost,
`ikiwiki` was assigning all the older posts to some day in Oct, 2012, which was
the date of the last backup/restore cycle.

Frustrated (yes, sometimes I have a low threshold), I left it like that: no planet
was flooded because in any case the rss feeds didn't really change, and nobody
would notice *and* complain about it. In fact, nobody did.[^1] Have in mid that
as I kept my old laptop as a server, and that I didn't clean up all the files
I keep in my backup, I still had the original mtimes in the original files.

Yesterday, playing around with unrelated things, I came across the post I mentioned
at the beginning of this one, and had the urge to really fix that mess. Today I
started looking at it, and found that this command was some part of it:

```bash
find src/projects/glob/work/ -name *.mdwn | xargs stat --format '%X %Y %Z %n'
```

but processing its output in `bash` seemed like a burden. Luckily, I have the
solution for that, a project that I started for exactly that same reason: `bash`
sucks at manipulating data.

So I grabbed my editor, punched keys for some 7 minutes, run 3 or 4 tests, making
sure that everything would go smooth, run once more on the live system, rebuilt
my glob[^2] and voilà! It's fixed now.

How long is the code? Not much really:

```python
from os import utime

with remote ('192.168.0.42', allow_agent=False, password='XXXXXXXX') as fds:
    # find al files (not only posts), get its times and path
    with cd ('src/projects/glob/work'):
        find ('.', '-name', '*.mdwn') | xargs ('stat', format='%X %Y %Z %n')

(i, o, e)= fds

for line in e.readlines ():
    print (line.decode ('utf-8'), end='')

for line in o.readlines ():
    data= line.split ()
    access, modif, change= [ int (x) for x in data[:3] ]
    file_path= data[3].decode ('utf-8')
    if _e (file_path):
        utime (file_path, times= (access, modif))
    else:
        print ("%s not found!" % file_path)
```

Notice that this example is even more complex than initially thought: it `ssh`'s
into the server to fetch the original times.

This makes one thing clear: I have to improve a lot the `remote()` API. For
instance, so far I have no way to know if the remote commands executed fine or
not, and the way to read the lines is still ugly and not homogeneous with how
other `ayrton` functions/executables work.

Also note that this does not restore the ctimes, as I hadn't found a way to do it,
but didn't really did a lot of effort. I don't really need them.

Of course, I also fixed my backup and restore scripts :)

[^1]: I was this >< close of adding `#foreveralone` to that sentence. I think I'll
    resist for a couple more years.

[^2]: Don't forget, `ikiwiki` compiles static sites.