If the patch is of interest I'm willing
to improve it by having the feature
present conditionally on the appearance of
    HAVE_WORKING_O_NOATIME
in 'config.h'.

Thanks, but there's no need for that; just have 'grep' complain if the option is used and O_NOATIME == 0.

I'm of two minds about this suggestion. On the one hand we don't want to add an option like this to every utility that reads files. On the other hand grep is used soooo often that it may be justifiable. What do other people think?

If we add it, it should not have a single-letter option, though, and the long option should be called "--atime-preserve" for compatibility with tar, and the patch should also use FTS_NOATIME to avoid updating atime on directories with grep -r, and it should be documented properly in grep.texi and in 'grep --help' output and in NEWS (plus maybe write a test case or two....).



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