Re: [Nms-cgi-devel] hacking the countdown script

[Jonathan S. <gel...@ge...>]

On Sat, 1 Dec 2001, grinder wrote:

> Hello list,
>
> I downloaded the countdown script, because it seemed like
> a good place to start. My idea is to run all of the nms
> scripts on http://grinder.perlmonk.org/ to give them a bit
> of a shakeout.
>
> So I configured the date to be 1/1/3001, the countdown to
> the next millenium. Ran the script. Date has passed.
>
> Huh?
>
> Then it struck me... the date is based on epoch seconds.
> So I set the countdown to the end of the epoch. I can
> just about recite it from memory, 19/1/2038 and a few
> hours more.
>
> Date has passed.
>
> Turns out, something somewhere is cutting the dates off
> at an arbitrary limit: 23:59:29 31/12/2037.
>
> One other point: '%c' as a strftime date specifier is a
> little cryptic. I would tend to prefer '%H:%M:%S %d/%m/%Y'.
> Regardless of the broken way Americans deal with dates,
> this is a little more self-documenting and therefore
> would probably let people modify the format string
> without having to read the man page.
>
> Here's the thing though. The 2038 limit is a little feeble.


Unfortunately it is a fixed limit in the implementation of most operating
systems (this is not Perl's fault).  The time_t variable is (in most
implementations) a 32 bit variable which (if defined as starting at
01/01/1970 as it is in POSIX ) runs out sometime in April 2038.

I guess we should document this but thats about it I'm afraid ...

/J\
-- 
Jonathan Stowe                      |
<http://www.gellyfish.com>          |      This space for rent
                                    |