Hello, I wondered if someone had a clue about the following behaviour. While debugging an erratic test_mailbox failure on RDM's buildbot (and other machines), it turned out that the system sometimes set the wrong mtime on a directory: $ date && python -c 'import os; os.link("setup.py", "t/c")' && stat t && date Sun Nov 1 09:49:04 EST 2009 File: `t' Size: 144 Blocks: 0 IO Block: 4096 directory Device: 811h/2065d Inode: 223152 Links: 2 Access: (0755/drwxr-xr-x) Uid: ( 1001/ pitrou) Gid: ( 1005/ pitrou) Access: 2009-11-01 09:10:11.000000000 -0500 Modify: 2009-11-01 09:49:03.000000000 -0500 Change: 2009-11-01 09:49:03.000000000 -0500 Sun Nov 1 09:49:04 EST 2009 As you see above, the mtime for directory 't' is set to a full second before the actual modification has happened. Sprinkling traces of time.time() and os.path.getmtime() on Lib/mailbox.py shows this is exactly what trips up test_mailbox. I've got posted a patch to fix it (see issue #6896), but I would like to know if such OS behaviour is normal. Regards Antoine.