Re: Active Directory

[Chris W. <ch...@cw...>]

On Wed, 2002-02-13 at 10:40, Al Lilianstrom wrote:
> I'm working with Active Directory manipulation from a Unix machine.
> We're going to have a centralized Oracle database feed my code to create
> accounts in AD. One of the items we want to set is the accountExpires
> field - esp for contractors. According to the schema this value is
> stored as a large integer that represents the number of seconds elapsed
> since 00:00:00, January 1, 1970. 
> 
> It's real easy to get the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970. But I'm
> unsure what this large integer format is and how to convert to it.

This is a common unix way to identify time. Jan 1, 1970 is known as the
epoch. Being of a unix heritage, Perl can translate to and from epoch
seconds easily:

From:

  my $time_sec = get_epoch_seconds();
  my ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst)
          = localtime( $time_sec );

To:

  use Time::Local;
  my $time_sec = timelocal($sec,$min,$hours,$mday,$mon,$year);

Note that $mon is a 0 offset value (0..11) in both cases. The $year
value returned from localtime() needs 1900 added to it to be a
human-readable value (e.g., this year localtime returns 102: 102 + 1900
= 2002). The timelocal() function is a little more flexible and can take
either a 1900-offset value or a four-digit year.

localtime() is a built-in function (see 'perldoc -f localtime') and
Time::Local is distributed with all modern (5.6+) versions of Perl.

I recently had to answer this for some of my win32 colleagues, so this
is very much in the front of my mind :-)

Chris

-- 
Chris Winters (ch...@cw...)
Building enterprise-capable snack solutions since 1988.