Raise a Glass — Time(2) Turns 40 Tonight 114
ddt writes "Raise your glasses of champagne in a toast at midnight. The time(2) system call turns 40 tonight, and is now officially 'over the hill.' It's been dutifully keeping track of time for clueful operating systems since January 1, 1970." And speaking of time, if you don't have a *nix system handy, or just want a second opinion, an anonymous reader points out this handy way to check just how far it is after local midnight in Unix time. Updated 10:03 GMT by timothy: The Unix-time-in-a-browser link has been replaced by a Rick Astley video; you have been warned.
Unix epoch? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why didn't we restart it at 2000 amidst the Y2K mess?
Re:Unix epoch? (Score:5, Interesting)
Putting it in 1970 is a pain. VMS at least put their zero date in 1858, where it is less likely to conflict with real dates. If course, VMS had 64 put support from the word go. Rebasing time_t would have created a horrible mess. Better to start again with a proper date type.
Why is there a link to this guy's blog? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why is there a link in the summary to some guy's blog which says exactly what I've pasted above? I mean really, just put the information in the summary without the link....
Re:Give it 28 years (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Give it 28 years (Score:3, Interesting)
Especially when the 32-bit time_t overflows. The good news is that most 64-bit OSes already uses a 64-bit time_t, but there still is the issue of truncation to 32-bit.
Shouldn't the 32 bit time_t expire in 2106 [wolframalpha.com]?
Re:Give it 28 years (Score:3, Interesting)
'fraid not. The 32-bit time_t is signed (I'm assuming so you can expression times less than the epoch, but that's just a guess). As such, it actually overflows in 2038 [wolframalpha.com].
Re:Over the hill? (Score:5, Interesting)