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I work in a school, and we had some assistance setting up a pretty clever file sharing schema. It’s quite nice. Each teacher has a Hand-Outs folder on the server, and a Hand-Ins drop box to accept assignments.

The one consistent complaint the teachers have is that they can’t tell when a student turned something in. If an assignment is due Monday, but they look in the folder Tuesday, they can’t tell if it was turned in Monday morning or five minutes before they looked, whereas if they accept assignments via email they see exactly when it arrived. I want to be able to have them see when a student put a file in their server drop box.

I’ve read a little bit about the “touch” command, and I sort of kind of get it.

I found this article: http://www.macworld.com/article/151498/2010/05/sort_downloads.html

Is there a way to make that work either on the server or on the teacher client machines so the teachers can see what date and time the assignments were added? Can I make the server change the date modified to the date added for every file that will ever go into those folders? If so, do I just run the command once for those folders, or do I have to run it all the time? Also, if I make it work on the server side, is there any chance of breaking other functionalities of the server?

I appreciate any and all help. Thanks so much.

Thanks!

Also, I’m unsure if I posted in the correct forum. I did do a search for “touch” and nothing came up. But I do want to make sure I put this post in the right place.