Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 21:59:10 -0400 (EDT) From: "Crist J. Clark" <cjc@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> To: ChrisMic@clientlogic.com (Christopher Michaels) Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG (FreeBSD Questions (E-mail)) Subject: Re: General Question: System date in FreeBSD 3.x Message-ID: <199910190159.VAA20341@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> In-Reply-To: <6C37EE640B78D2118D2F00A0C90FCB4401105D0B@site2s1> from Christopher Michaels at "Oct 18, 1999 06:46:03 pm"
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Christopher Michaels wrote, > Hi, > This is a general question. I thought that the date/time on a UNIX system, > and in the kernel was tracked in seconds from the epoch (1/1/70). But, > recently I had a problem where cvsup kept dumping core on my friends new > 3.3-release installation. > > What I came to find out was that the system date was set to the year 1904. > Fixing the date resolved this issue, but it brought up the question. How > exactly does FreeBSD keep time internally? Is a negative time allowed? Time is stored as a 'time_t' type which, if you look hard enough in /usr/include, is just a 'long'. It is a signed 4-byte integer. Play with positive and negative UNIX epoch times with 'date -r'. The fact that it is signed is why it will run out in 2^31-1 seconds after Jan 0 1970 in 2038. -- Crist J. Clark cjclark@home.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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