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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."

15 of 376 comments (clear)

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

    Is that with or without leap seconds?

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    1. Re:Leap Seconds? by dotancohen · · Score: 5, Funny

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

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  2. 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.

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    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.

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    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. 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.

  4. why command-line? by FooAtWFU · · Score: 5, Interesting

    http://coolepochcountdown.com/

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  5. 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!

  6. 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."

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  7. 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!!!"

  8. 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.

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  9. 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

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

    The french tried it. It failed.

    If any post should be marked redundant...

  11. 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?!