This is UNIX, the filesystem consists of FILES - period. What you do with
magic bits in the filesystem is your business.
There used to be all manner of neat things one could do with setting/clearing
the directory bit in the inode... turn a regular file into a directory and
vice-versa. The kernel now blocks such idiot things as accessing directories
without specifying that you accessing them as a directory: 'cat .' no longer
works.
>ATIME is the access time for an inode, when you read an inode which
>happens to be a directory you are accessing it.
A clarification... if you access an inode (any inode,) the access time is
updated. stat()ing the inode accesses the inode, hence the atime is updated
for every file on the drive following 'ls -laR /'
--Ricky