Does syncthing sometimes change ctime or do a re-sync of some dirs?

[thomasmerz]

Hi,

I have some dirs on a storage mounted with fuse.sshfs with these stat and syncthing running on this machine:

Access: 1997-04-06 00:00:00.000000000 +0200
Modify: 1997-04-06 00:00:00.000000000 +0200
Change: 1997-04-06 00:00:00.000000000 +0200
 Birth: -

On another machine mounted with xfs and with syncthing running I have these stat with

Access: 2025-08-18 13:23:48.639850448 +0200
Modify: 1997-04-06 00:00:00.000000000 +0200
Change: 2025-08-18 13:23:40.611954647 +0200
 Birth: 2019-01-22 22:37:24.740107935 +0100

I regularly do some checks by find . -mindepth 2 -type d -ctime -7 what dirs are newly created within the last 7 days and I’m curious why and what might have changed ctime of some dirs:

Does syncthing do this for some reasons even if there’s nothing to do for these dirs?

Or can someone explain how this might happen?

Thanks!

[calmh (Jakob Borg)]

These times will change when changes are made inside the directory, e.g. files created or deleted, or when directory permissions change. Syncthing doesn’t try to explicitly manage times on directories.

[thomasmerz]

Thanks, that’s it! Now I have to investigate what is changing inside my dirs that I currently don’t know or understand…