> The only other solution I've ever managed to come up with involves
> adding another file operation (perhaps with fcntl() or similar) to ask
> the kernel if the file has been written to since the last time a given
> process accessed the file.

VMS version numbers?

But the real question (at least here) is not "has the file been written" but
"did something change", so running diff against the real crontab file and
the temporary would be less efficient but give better results ;-)


Martin