undefined timestamp of a file locked by a process

Question

A daemon script creates some intermediate files which it removes at the end before sleeping. While the daemon script writes to the intermediate files, if we do an ls -lrt in the path we can see as follows:

:~/reports/jobs/Processorlog 12 $ ls -lrt|head

total 1276875

**?--------- ? ? ? ? ? 48_QUERY1_1.log_spool.txt

?--------- ? ? ? ? ? 48_QUERY1_1.log_opsspool.txt**

-rw-rw-r-- 1 jsil isdev 3703039 Jul 19 00:00 49_QUERY1_1-2013-07-18.log

-rw-rw-r-- 1 jsil isdev 856744 Jul 19 00:00 43_QUERY1-2013-07-18.log

The first 2 are the intermediate files which are locked by the daemon process and on doing ls -lrt it is showing ? timestamp.

Has anyone found this problem ? And if we do a unix stat command on the file, what will the modification date of the file ?

Answer 1

As far as I can tell, ls failed to fstat the files (presumably because they were removed before it got to them, but after being listed).