I'm going to retract my prior statement: this actually shouldn't be required here (anymore) since the assertions after line 56 (the echo foo >a) are actually checking to make sure the reported values are greater than the previous values (it mattered for the prior steps, e.g., line 50-52, since it was testing equality). All that being said, the ost values should really be reset between each operation to ensure sanity comparing the checkpoints in time between the various assertions.

It would have been helpful if the messages had helped note which test case was failing, but it seems pretty obvious based on the code that ost_atime prior to this would always be greater than it was before, unless the clock on the system went backwards somehow.

It absolutely _is_ needed to verify that cat a above updated the atime.

correction: to verify that echo >a below updates the atime