Silly season

Thu Dec 23 00:00:48 UTC 1999

On Wed, Dec 22, 1999 at 01:55:17PM -0900, Aaron Dewell wrote:
> 
> Or February 6, 2106 at 6:28:14 if your UNIX system keeps an unsigned 32-bit
> time_t.  I Y2.038k tested my Solaris 7 box, it kept time past 3:14 AM 1/19/38,
> but the date command would not set it.  Which implies that the kernel itself is
> unsigned, while the date command uses a signed number.

Wasting an entire 2 billion seconds to check for a -1 error condition
instead of the one's complement 0xFFFFFFFF is remarkably stupid imho. But
it would break a lot of userland programs to change. As far as I know in
BSD it is still a signed long, at least in machine/ansi.h.

-- 
Richard A. Steenbergen <ras at above.net>  http://users.quadrunner.com/humble
PGP Key ID: 0x60AB0AD1  (E5 35 10 1D DE 7D 8C A7  09 1C 80 8B AF B9 77 BB)
AboveNet Communications - AboveSecure Network Security Engineer, Vienna VA
"A mind is like a parachute, it works best when open."   -- Unknown