[lug] This Saturday: Unix - one gigasecond since the epoch

[Neal McBurnett]

Ahh - the end of the first gigasecond of official Unix kernel
time is nigh.  This is the time recorded in all your filesystem
timestamps, etc.

$ perl -le 'print scalar gmtime 1e9'
Sun Sep  9 01:46:40 2001	# UTC

$ perl -le 'print scalar localtime(1E9)'
Sat Sep  8 19:46:40 2001	# Mountain Daylight Time

Also:
$ tcl> clock format 1000000000

$ echo '0t1000000000=Y' | TZ=UTC adb  # on solaris

I hope some python fan will step in here....

A google search for
   "46:40"  unix epoch
has more, including speculation that some silly programmers have
relied on time_t being 9 characters long, resulting in a 1Gs bug

See also "Critical and Significant Dates":
    http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/critdate.htm

But note that this will be celebrated 1,000,000,023 seconds after the
epoch actually began, because Unix time ignores the 23 leap seconds
since then....
      ftp://maia.usno.navy.mil/ser7/tai-utc.dat

This should really be celebrated with a party, irc session,
or something.

Cheers,

Neal McBurnett <neal at bcn.boulder.co.us>
http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/      (with GPG/PGP keys)