Letting the chips fall where they may, I quote Alan Modra second hand:
>On Wed, 24 Sep 1997, Alan Modra wrote:
>> > The directory, yes. After all, I did read (access) all the directories.
>> > However, some directory files do not contain other directory files.
>> > They contain "normal" files which were not accessed at all. These files
>> > should not have had their ATIME updated because they were not accessed.
>>
>> ls -F will access the files. check that you don't alias ls to 'ls -F'
Actually, it does not... go 'strace' an 'ls -F'. If will read the directory
via getdents and lstat all the files.
--Ricky