AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO HAS NOTICED?! Options

[Maccabee]

I think another minor Y2K has occurred. or is about to occur. There have been various reports here and there that I have seen that made the year on people computers say 1969. I believe Mipadi, you said you had this problem? and I saw it on various other forums. And now tj's time thread and other crap happening.

What going down?

[mipadi]

I'm not sure what you're getting at. Do you mean the occasions on which you might have copied a file from another machine, and the date created reads December 31, 1969? That's because the computer on which the file was created uses a different timestamping mechanism that other file systems won't understand. This often happens when copying files from Windows to a Unix-based system, since FAT and NTFS use a rather different way to store creation times.

Longer Explanation

On Unix, time is stored as a 32-bit signed integer ("signed" meaning it can store positive and negative values) that represents the number of seconds since the Unix epoch, which was January 1, 1970 at midnight. But if the file system can't interpret the creation date, it uses -1 as the creation date. In Unix time, -1 is one second prior to the Unix epoch, which is December 31, 1969 at 11:59:59 PM.