in reply to Leap second coming up. Check your date handling code

Many years ago, when I was first on the web, there was a lot of perl code going around by a person which I will call Matt Wrong.

Roll on the year 2000. All of a sudden, a lot of perl coded forums (and such) displayed the year as 19100.

Of course, the reason was the '19' was hard coded and the tenary years was a counter... the counter reached 100... ha ha.

Great times. On slashdot a few years later was a post on what the 2000's should be called (i.e. swingng sixties, etc..). I suggested the '19100's' which got a lot of feedback

So, the moral of this story is let the system do the work - why code your own time stuff?

$date=`date`; *

... and then fiddle with it.

Nick

* man date

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Leap second coming up. Check your date handling code
by RonW (Parson) on Jan 04, 2017 at 22:14 UTC
    So, the moral of this story is let the system do the work - why code your own time stuff?
    $date=`date`; *
    ... and then fiddle with it.

    Assuming date works correctly.

    Back at the turn of 2000, where I worked (then), we had a few legacy apps that were dependent on older versions of Unix. On those systems, the date command started displaying the year as 19100. This was because the systems were old enough that the code (in the date command) that converted the epoch time still didn't account for extracting more than 2 digits worth of year from the epoch time. And, of course, the year was formatted with "19%d", thus the "19100" result.

    So, whatever command - or CPAN module - you use, make sure it actually works for your needs.