Access time does not change after a file is opened

Question

I am using stat to get the acess time of a file (current date is October 23, 2013)

[juan@JN-LNXSVR-02 labfiles]$ stat nursery
  File: `nursery'
  Size: 837         Blocks: 8          IO Block: 4096   regular file
Device: fd00h/64768d    Inode: 139539      Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--)  Uid: (  500/    juan)   Gid: (  500/    juan)
Access: 2013-10-22 18:03:20.703888346 -0400
Modify: 2013-10-21 16:57:07.801165793 -0400

then I edit the file and close it without any modification, and submit stat again

juan@JN-LNXSVR-02 labfiles]$ vi nursery
[juan@JN-LNXSVR-02 labfiles]$ stat nursery
  File: `nursery'
  Size: 837         Blocks: 8          IO Block: 4096   regular file
Device: fd00h/64768d    Inode: 139539      Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--)  Uid: (  500/    juan)   Gid: (  500/    juan)
Access: 2013-10-22 18:03:20.703888346 -0400
Modify: 2013-10-21 16:57:07.801165793 -0400
Change: 2013-10-21 16:57:07.801165793 -0400

but the access time did not change, why?

I could not find any noatime attribute

juan@JN-LNXSVR-02 labfiles]$ grep noatime /proc/mounts
[juan@JN-LNXSVR-02 labfiles]$

The output of the mount command is

[juan@JN-LNXSVR-02 labfiles]$ mount

/dev/mapper/vg_jnlnxsvr02-lv_root on / type ext4 (rw)

proc on /proc type proc (rw)

sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw) 

devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620) 

tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,rootcontext="system_u:object_r:tmpfs_t:s0")


/dev/sda1 on /boot type ext4 (rw)
none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw)

sunrpc on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw)

[juan@JN-LNXSVR-02 labfiles]$ 

Answer 1

Could you include the output of mount? Maybe your disk is mounted with noatime?

EDIT (again): relatime would only update it once when reading after a modification but not every time. Since Linux 2.6.30 this seems to be the standard option, so if you do write + read it would update on the read. But write + read + read would only update it for the first read (and once after every following modification).

Given that your access time is already newer than your modification time, the access time would not be updated when mounted with relatime (or without atime option) if you only read.

from man mount:

noatime
 Do not update inode access times on this filesystem (e.g., for faster access on
 the news spool to speed up news servers).

relatime
 Update  inode  access  times relative to modify or change time.  Access time is
 only updated if the previous access time was earlier than the current modify or
 change  time. (Similar to noatime, but doesn't break mutt or other applications
 that need to know if a file has been read since the last time it was modified.)
 Since Linux 2.6.30, the kernel defaults to the behavior provided by this option
 (unless  noatime  was   specified),  and  the strictatime option is required to
 obtain traditional semantics. In addition, since Linux 2.6.30, the file's  last
 access time is always  updated  if  it  is more than 1 day old.

And for the record, if you want to have the old behaviour back, use strictatime.

Allows to explicitly requesting full atime updates. This makes it possible for
kernel to defaults to relatime or noatime but still allow userspace to override
it. For more details about the default system mount options see /proc/mounts.