For those of you who don't know, this Saturday evening is a somewhat interesting milestone in computing history. It is the day that the unix timestamp (i.e. the value that time() returns) rolls over to 1,000,000,000.

This afternoon, a mailing list I'm on received a one-liner from our departed abigail about it. We started chatting about it in the CB and decided that there should be some sort of repository here for nifty scripts (and/or discussions, etc) relating to this event.

So, here are a few that we came up with:

# show the current unix timestamp
perl -le 'print time'

# prints the rollover moment for your timezone (from ChemBoy)
perl -le 'print scalar localtime 1e9'

# count up to rollover (from abigail)
perl -le 'sleep 1 while print time'

# count down to rollover
perl -le 'sleep 1 while print 1e9-time'

# count in both direction on a vt100 term (modified from one of MrNobo
+1024's)
clear; perl -le 'sleep 1 while print "\e[1A", 1e9 - time, " ==> ", tim
+e'

[download]
Oh, and the EFF is having a Music Share-In Festival in SF's Golden Gate Park that day. Its possible that a unix-rollover party might break out in the middle of it, so if you're in the area, I invite you to stop by and enjoy yourself.

-Blake

In reply to A billion seconds of Unix by blakem

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