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Re: Debian was hacked: The Canterbury Distribution (howto write the date)



In <[🔎] 4D96A8C3.9080208@cox.net>, Ron Johnson wrote:
>I've always thought that Unix Time is *incredibly stupid* (who the heck
>says "Fri Apr  1 23:27:41 CDT 2011"?)
>and *monumentally shortsighted*
>(did nothing happen before 01-Jan-1970?).

What makes you say this is UNIX time?  The UNIX standard provides many ways of 
displaying a time, and AFAIK, doesn't really prefer any particular string 
format.

For me, UNIX time is nanoseconds from Epoch.  The time_t and clock_t types are 
allowed to be signed and any reasonable size.  The timespec structure 
specifically records nanosecond and interprets a time_t as seconds.  The 
clock_t type was "always" in microseconds in SUSv2, but even then there was 
warning that it might change.

Traditionally, UNIX-like systems have used a 32-bit signed time_t, but I'm 
pretty sure all the *BSDs (including Mac OS X) and the Linux kernel have moved 
beyond that.  I'm not sure about AIX and Solaris.  I'm pretty sure there won't 
be anymore HP-UX.
-- 
Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.                   ,= ,-_-. =.
bss@iguanasuicide.net                   ((_/)o o(\_))
ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy         `-'(. .)`-'
http://iguanasuicide.net/                    \_/

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