touch(1), utimes(2), nfs on sparc running SunOS4.1

[Steve Cumming, net.leftist]

This is probably very old news, but touch seems to fail when the file in
question is NFS mounted and already exists.  I have been unable to
determine if the arch/os of the remote system are important. (Can't rsh to
find out what they are.)

One gets the suspicious Dec 31 1969 date. 

This is not a big problem for me, as I've grabbed a 4.3 touch which
actually scribbles on the file. Sun-touch tries to use utime(2), passing
the advertised NULL  pointer, which is supposed to update mod time and
access time to now.

I'm just a little curious about what the bug is...

burton at unixg.ubc.ca