Date: Mon, 03 Jul 2000 18:26:29 GMT From: bart.lateur@skynet.be (Bart Lateur) To: FreeBSD-Questions <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Weird Y2K bug in tar Message-ID: <3961d935.1250038@relay.skynet.be>
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So you thought it was all over? So did I. I tried to create an incremental backup archive of a directory tree, using a special feature of tar, and including only the files that were changed today. The command line, at telnet (bash shell): tar -c -f data1.tar --newer-mtime 'Jul 3 2000 3:00 GMT' data/ It didn't work. It always complained about an "invalid date format". BTW I tried lots of variations. No luck. I replaced the "2000" with "1999", and it works! Of course, my archive isn't selective at all, but it proves that my date format is quite alright. It looks like "tar" can't deal with dates later than 1999. Yes, the clock is set OK, so the program doesn' think this is a time in the future. It tried this command as well: perl -e 'print scalar gmtime' and it prints nothing! This could be related. Using gmtime() in a CGI script on the same server, however, prints the expected result, i.e. a date string. My ISP looks to be running a very old version of FreeBSD: 2.2.6, dated Sept 6 1981. The GNU tar program, however, is even more recent than what I've got here on my own 3.4 box: 1.11.3 vs. 1.11.2 on my system. And on my box, this date works. So, what can I tell my ISP? Where would they have to start looking? I would suspect some non-Y2K compliant library file got linked in... -- Bart. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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