Re: invalid date from date -d 1969-12-31

[Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net>]

On Tue, 2003-01-28 at 09:32, George Georgalis wrote:
> 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.
> 
> Guess again. It works fine here... debian 3.0r1
> $ date -d "1/15/1905"
> Sun Jan 15 00:00:00 EST 1905
> $ date -d "1/15/1905" +%s
> -2049994800
> 
> Wouldn't surprise me if I couldn't set my clock to negative Unix time
> though.
> 
> <my guess> try "export LC_TIME=C" or better yet "export LC_ALL=C" man
> locale for details. </my guess>

$ date -d "1/15/1905"
date: invalid date `1/15/1905'

$ LC_TIME=C date -d "1/15/1905"
date: invalid date `1/15/1905'

$ LC_ALL=C date -d "1/15/1905"
date: invalid date `1/15/1905'


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| Ron Johnson, Jr.        mailto:ron.l.johnson@cox.net          |
| Jefferson, LA  USA      http://members.cox.net/ron.l.johnson  |
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