Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

February 13th, UNIX Time Will Reach 1234567890

Posted by timothy on from the less-often-than-a-stopped-clock-is-right dept.

mikesd81 writes "Over at Linux Magazine Online, Jon maddog Hall writes that on Friday the 13th, 2009 at 11:31:30pm UTC UNIX time will reach 1,234,567,890. This will be Friday, February 13th at 1831 and 30 seconds EST. Matias Palomec has a perl script you an use to see what time that will be for you: perl -e 'print scalar localtime(1234567890),"\n";' Now, while this is not the UNIX epoch, Alan Cox does assure us that Linux is now working on 64-bit time, and the UNIX epoch 'roll-over' would happen about the time that the sun burnt out."

1 of 376 comments (clear)

  1. Leap seconds by CustomDesigned · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Raw unix time is simply a count of seconds since a defined point in time - and has nothing to do with leap seconds. Leap seconds only come into play when converting to human readable display format (along with timezones and DST). Leap seconds have been handled for some time by the zoneinfo library used by most unix and linux distros. Even Java handles leap seconds with my port of zoneinfo to a Java TimeZone implementation.

    The tzdata package included in most Linux distros includes leapsecond data in the "right" directory. You can find out the time including leapseconds by setting your TZ environment variable to "right/...". For instance:


    $ TZ="right/US/Eastern" date; TZ="US/Eastern" date
    Sun Feb 8 17:52:42 EST 2009
    Sun Feb 8 17:53:06 EST 2009