Re: File systems' timestamps apparently formatted in a wrong way ...

[Chris Jackson <c.jackson@shadowcat.co.uk>]

Albretch Mueller wrote:

> ~
>  ... or ls not properly displaying them in some cases.
> ~
>  I got this compressed file that seems to be the metadata snapshot of
> a file system you get by running:
> ~
>  ls -lR
> ~
>  but not all timestamps are formatted the same. You get them as, say,
> "Mar 24 2004", but also as "Dec 26 09:55" (without the year!) and they
> are (or seem to be) files in the same directory
> ~
>  Why would that be?


Under the C or POSIX locale, timestamps which are near to now are shown
with the time and without the year; those well removed show the year,
but not the time. I'm not sure of exactly how far into the future or
past the cutoff point is. This is generally useful to human readers but
a pain for automated parsing. With GNU ls, you can pass --full-time or
--time-style=<various options> (see the ls man page for details);
alternatively stat can be useful. Other locales may vary.

--
Chris Jackson
Shadowcat Systems Ltd.