Does opening a Windows file in Linux update the file's access time?

Question

I've got two hard drives in my computer, one with Windows and one with Linux (Vista and Mint 16, respectively). If I boot up Linux, I can then mount the other hard drive and access files on it. Each file in Windows has an access time that says when it was last opened. What I'm wondering is if that only shows when it was last opened in Windows, or when it was last opened in general.

Or, in other words, are file access times OS dependent?

Note: I am using the generic window and linux tags because I am curious how this works in general, and not just on my specific machine

Answer 1

As long as both systems can read the contents of the hard drive, the access time is correct- meaning that yes, access time can be read and written by either Linux or Windows. It might just show up differently because of how your Linux and Windows setups handle the system clock (see below).

Dates and times are part of a list of common filesystem features: Wikipedia.

Between Windows and Linux, however, depending on if you have localtime or UTC set up, you might have times that are hours off from each other. Windows uses UTC with NTFS and localtime with FAT: MSDN.