Does apt-cacher change packages access time?

I tried to remove the long time unused packages from apt-cacher archive using find:

$ find /var/cache/apt-cacher -atime +5 -type f -name ".*deb*" | wc -l 8471
$ find /var/cache/apt-cacher -atime +9 -type f -name ".*deb*" | wc -l 2269
$ find /var/cache/apt-cacher -atime +10 -type f -name ".*deb*" | wc -l 0

Can I depend on the "Access Time" for apt-cacher archive usage?

That is, does "Access Time" change only when package get received by the user?

We are using apt-cacher for more than 6 months.


Are you sure that the atime on your files is properly kept? Many filesystems use mounted nowadays with noatime or relatime options to reduce the amount to writes to the disk.

Those options influence how and how often the atime stat field is written.