20.2. Optional Mandatory Behaviors

This section specifies behaviors that are mandatory in one of the standards on which this specification relies, but which are optional in this specification.

POSIX 1003.1-2008 (ISO/IEC 9945-2009) describes the behavior of the file access time, available as the st_atime field of the stat and stat64 structures. An LSB conforming implementation need not update this information every time a file is accessed.

Note: A subsequent edition of the POSIX standard no longer mandates updating of st_atime but the older edition is still the guiding standard for this specification, thus this exception is needed.