OT: "S1G" (was Re: invalid date from date -d 1969-12-31)
On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 11:36:36PM -0800, Eric G. Miller wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 10:59:47PM -0500, Stan Heckman wrote:
> > On my system, date -d returns "invalid date" for dates before 1970. It
> > is possible that this began when I upgraded libc6. Any suggestions?
>
> 1970-01-01 is time zero for *nixen. You're asking about what happened
> before the big bang! Guess "date" is not as generally useful for
> reformatting dates as it could be. However, its primary function is to
> set/print the current date/time which is always more recent than 1970.
speaking of which, we missed a great opportunity to scare the
wits out of the entire population a while back. remember y2k?
that was just when a decimal digit was gonna flip from "1" to
"2".
big fat hairy deal.
how about ADDING a whole new digit? that's a whole new ball of
wax, and much more significant in the grand scheme of things.
no, not y-10-k, that's a looong way off.
time zero is 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC, right? well, guess when we
passed time 999_999_999?
$ perl -e 'print scalar gmtime 1_000_000_000;'
Sun Sep 9 01:46:40 2001
Second-One-Gig was 9-september, a bit past midnight.
where's cnn when you need them? we coulda had panic in the
streets! cambells soup woulda been sold out! the networks coulda
had a ball!
never mind that the programming was intelligent from day one (as
opposed to those falsely-lazy 2-digit years). why avert a panic
when you can have RATINGS and pandelirium?
--
I use Debian/GNU Linux version 3.0;
Linux server 2.4.20-k6 #1 Mon Jan 13 23:49:14 EST 2003 i586 unknown
DEBIAN NEWBIE TIP #41 from Colin Watson <cjw44@flatline.org.uk>
:
Do you need to MASSAGE A BUNCH OF FILE NAMES? There's more
than one way to skin a cat -- here are some examples of
canonicalizing file names to lower-case:
mmv \* \#l1
rename 'tr/A-Z/a-z/' *
zsh -c 'for x in *; do mv "$x" "${x:l}"; done'
(The "rename" command is a standard perl script, by the way.)
Also see http://newbieDoc.sourceForge.net/ ...
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