Re: ls default time style

[Markus Kuhn]

Andreas Schwab wrote on 2001-12-11 14:21 UTC:
> address@hidden (Markus Kuhn) writes:
> 
> |> Could the date field to occupy 14 characters? In that case, I would
> |> advocate the format "YY-MM-DD HH:MM" to be used everywhere. In practice,
> |> POSIX implementations can't represent dates outside 1970-2038
> 
> What about 64 bit time_t?

I still have to actually see that on a POSIX system. Even the DEC Tru64
operating system has 32-bit time_t, as do NFS and many other file
systems, formats and protocols. People who dream about 64-bit time_t
haven't understood, what a plague backwards compatibility really is. In
case you haven't realized it yet: we are most likely *not* going to have
64-bit time_t on 64-bit CPUs, and the 2038 problem will have to be
solved with windowing algorithms, for which at that time the Y2K-hack
patents should have expired.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>