Slashdot Mirror


February 13th, UNIX Time Will Reach 1234567890

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."

38 of 376 comments (clear)

  1. Leap Seconds? by John+Hasler · · Score: 5, Funny

    Is that with or without leap seconds?

    --
    Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
    1. Re:Leap Seconds? by dotancohen · · Score: 5, Funny

      On Friday the 13th, every second is a leap second. BOO!

      --
      It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
    2. Re:Leap Seconds? by Yvan256 · · Score: 4, Funny

      What do you mean? An African or European leap second?

  2. scalar() unnecessary by A+nonymous+Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    perl -e 'print localtime(1234567890) ."\n";'

    Let the "." concatenate operator do it for you.

    1. Re:scalar() unnecessary by rfuilrez · · Score: 5, Interesting

      TIZZLE:~ ben$ perl -e 'print localtime(1234554321) ."\n";'
      Fri Feb 13 13:45:21 2009

      Apparently a palindrome is one the same day!

    2. Re:scalar() unnecessary by jlarocco · · Score: 4, Informative

      Perl is unnecessary:

      date -d@1234567890

    3. Re:scalar() unnecessary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Thus proving TMTOWTDI. ;)

      Teenage mutant turtle on wild turtle date...? What the hell does I stand for?!

  3. It's also a notable day because... by A+beautiful+mind · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...it's my birthday. I've been telling people for years that my birthday is at 1234567890.

    --
    It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
    Be yourself no matter what they say
    1. Re:It's also a notable day because... by jellomizer · · Score: 5, Funny

      Then they look at you like you are an idiot and never talk to you again. enjoy you birthday alone.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    2. Re:It's also a notable day because... by kohaku · · Score: 5, Funny

      WRONG. I'll bet his birthday party is going to be EPOCH.

    3. Re:It's also a notable day because... by beav007 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Don't forget to party like it's 915148769

    4. Re:It's also a notable day because... by ahankinson · · Score: 4, Funny

      Party like it's 7pm on Dec. 31, 1998? Geez... at least wait until 915166800

  4. Actually, the date... by dotancohen · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...that I really feel I missed:

    $ perl -e 'print scalar localtime(8675309),"\n";'
    Sat Apr 11 11:48:29 1970

    --
    It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
  5. What kind of stupid time is that? by John.P.Jones · · Score: 4, Funny

    So the time is 123456789? That's the stupidest time I've ever heard in my life... It sounds like something an idiot would have on his luggage.

  6. Re:so what? by Bozzio · · Score: 4, Funny

    Wow, you must have a hard time finding joy in anything.

    --
    I just pooped your party.
  7. Perl script is unnecessary by Chris+Pimlott · · Score: 5, Informative

    The standard unix date command will suffice:

    date -d @1234567890

    1. Re:Perl script is unnecessary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny
      Leave it to a Slashdot story to make my terminal window look like this:

      dave@tomservo:~$ perl -e 'print scalar localtime(1234567890),"\n";'
      Fri Feb 13 18:31:30 2009
      dave@tomservo:~$ perl -e 'print ~~ localtime(1234567890),"\n"'
      Fri Feb 13 18:31:30 2009
      dave@tomservo:~$ perl -e 'print localtime(1234567890) ."\n";'
      Fri Feb 13 18:31:30 2009
      dave@tomservo:~$ `watch date +"%s"`

      dave@tomservo:~$ perl -le 'print ~~localtime 1234567890'
      Fri Feb 13 18:31:30 2009
      dave@tomservo:~$ date -d @1234567890
      Fri Feb 13 18:31:30 EST 2009
      dave@tomservo:~$

      I've wasted my life.

  8. With by Vellmont · · Score: 3, Informative

    Good question:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time

    the times it represents are UTC but it has no way of representing UTC leap seconds (e.g. 1998-12-31 23:59:60).

    I don't think there's any defined way for a POSIX machine to deal with leap seconds. The usual solution is to slew the clock a bit after they occur.

    --
    AccountKiller
    1. Re:With by ultranova · · Score: 4, Informative

      maybe we could just move to a calendar and time system that gives finer resolution and is based on 10's like the metric system.

      Unix clock is using the metric system. "Second", after all, is the metric unit for time, and Unix clock simply counts the seconds after a certain point in time. It's only the human representation of that value which deals with minutes and such.

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

    2. Re:With by Daimanta · · Score: 4, Informative

      The french tried it. It failed.

      The days(fixed) in a year(fixed) are not divisible by 10 so there were days without a month. Furthermore it increases the number of days in each week and it changed the definition of the hour(10 each day) the minute(100 each hour) and the second(100 each minute).

      All in all, it was a mess. Not designed with nature as a guideline(like pretty much all other calendars) but with the number 10, a number based on the fingers on our hands.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar

      --
      Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
    3. Re:With by schon · · Score: 4, Informative

      in what way is the "second" metric?

      How about this way?

    4. Re:With by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      The french tried it. It failed.

      If any post should be marked redundant...

  9. why command-line? by FooAtWFU · · Score: 5, Interesting
    --
    The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
  10. Re:Must be a slow news day.. by FooAtWFU · · Score: 5, Funny

    The OS itself may live past the 2038 32-bit time_t rollover, but the same cannot be said about all mission-critical apps that may be running on top of the Linux OS.

    Or any OS, for that matter.

    And now a bit of topical humor so this post isn't purely an exercise in pointing out the obvious: "Every day is a long day, because 86400 seconds won't fit in a short."

    --
    The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
  11. For about half the world .... by taniwha · · Score: 3, Interesting

    this of course will be happening on Sat Feb 14th .... at about lunch time here in NZ .... earlier that day (at breakfast) it will be 1234554321

  12. Y2^40K by DRJlaw · · Score: 5, Funny

    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."

    This is just the sort of short-sighted thinking that lead to our recent Y2K hysteria, except this time our poor beleaguered descendents will be in the middle of an exodus from the solar system when all their legacy systems throw simultaneous exceptions. This will of course cause their engine and guidance systems to fail, so that the last dying gasps of humanity will consist of:

    [Captain]Captain's log, stardate 1704.4. Ship out of control, spiraling down towards Sol; we have 19 minutes of life left, without engine power or helm control.
    [Engineer interrupting] I'll be damned. The clocks on every piece of technology in existence have failed because that damned Brit used a 64 bit counter...
    [Captain]COOOOOOOOOOOOOX!!!"

  13. Re:so what? by techno-vampire · · Score: 5, Funny
    If you think people get crazy about pi day wait till you mix pi and unix.

    However, considering that OSX is based on BSD, you can also get Apple pi.

    --
    Good, inexpensive web hosting
  14. dammit! by tbj61898 · · Score: 4, Funny

    it's my password... now everyone know it, thanks SLASHDOT! :-)

    --
    nop, nop, nop #VBLANK
  15. Why all the hatin'? by altek · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yes, it's a slow news day and that's why this is on the front page! It's Sunday afternoon (for most of us), ferchrissakes.

    So just enjoy it, it's geeky and novel. I don't think anybody meant for it to be considered a big deal, and if you don't find any fleeting moment of joy from it, just move along.

    --
    THE MAGIC WORDS ARE SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE
  16. 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

    1. Re:Leap seconds by hamster_nz · · Score: 3, Informative

      Sorry, UNIX time is exactly 86400 seconds per day.

      If you read this history of POSIX time it becomes apparent that POSIX time is a mashup of UTC and GMT that is different to either.

      The standard does not require your system clock to be accurate. When a leap second occurs, unless your POSIX system makes the effort to adjust its clock (say via the adjtimex(2) call), your POSIX system's clock will ignore the leap second.

      To make matters worse, people are now syncing their systems to a UTC or TIA time source, or perhaps even GPS time which are all defined on different foundations.

      You can not assume that POSIX time actually means anything better than the time on your watch does, unless you are fully aware the whole chain.

    2. Re:Leap seconds by JackHoffman · · Score: 3, Informative

      Total moderation failure...

      Here's how the standard defines the meaning of "seconds since the epoch" in relation to UTC dates: http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap04.html#tag_04_14
      As you can see, the meaning is actually "seconds since the epoch, excluding leap seconds." Always read the definitions.

      According to that definition, the time_t value of "Friday the 13th, 2009 at 11:31:30pm UTC" is:
      30 + 31*60 + 23*3600 + 43*86400 + (109-70)*31536000 + ((109-69)/4)*86400 - ((109-1)/100)*86400 + ((109+299)/400)*86400
      = 30 + 1860 + 39600 + 3715200 + 1229904000 + 864000 - 86400 + 86400
      = 1234567890

      So, to answer the question which started this: Not including leap seconds.

      Besides, it should be "Friday the 13th, 2009 at 23:31:30 UTC." The am/pm notation is not without ambiguities.

    3. Re:Leap seconds by sshock · · Score: 4, Informative

      Sorry, UNIX time is exactly 86400 seconds per day.

      Exactly. Mod parent up. Mod gparent down.

      date -u -d @1230767999
      Wed Dec 31 23:59:59 UTC 2008

      date -u -d @1230768000
      Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 UTC 2009

      What happened to the leap second? It was completely ignored, yep.

    4. Re:Leap seconds by omnichad · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Pedantically.... You should always store in UTC. GMT is just a more important local time, but still subject to local laws and whims.

  17. S^64 and Solar burnout by sprior · · Score: 4, Funny

    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."

    So great, we're going to be dealing with the 64bit time roll over in the dark? What kinda planning is that! Do we have candles?

  18. Re:so what? by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 3, Funny

    1234567890 is some arbitrary decimal string, if you wished to note a notable number, why not one which is 2^N, for something so entirely based within computers, it seems much more sensible to think in binary than some decimal number which happens to look a little pretty

    Why do we have gaydar but not virgindar?

    --

    "I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)

  19. 64-bit time EXCEPT... by jimicus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ... for any application that assumes sizeof(time_t) is 32 bits.

    Not that I'd expect that to be the case with any half-decent intelligently written application. But we all know how common applications which are neither half-decent nor intelligently written are...

  20. Linux interpretation of Posix by CustomDesigned · · Score: 4, Informative

    I am gratified to see that time() in gnu/linux returns seconds since the epoch. They mention the contradictory requirements of Posix, but opine that it was a technical error, and seconds since the epoch is what they really meant (or should have meant).

    NOTES POSIX.1 defines seconds since the Epoch as a value to be interpreted as
                  the number of seconds between a specified time and the Epoch, according
                  to a formula for conversion from UTC equivalent to conversion on the
                  naive basis that leap seconds are ignored and all years divisible by 4
                  are leap years. This value is not the same as the actual number of
                  seconds between the time and the Epoch, because of leap seconds and
                  because clocks are not required to be synchronised to a standard refer-
                  ence. The intention is that the interpretation of seconds since the
                  Epoch values be consistent; see POSIX.1 Annex B 2.2.2 for further
                  rationale.