On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 11:36:36PM -0800, Eric G. Miller wrote: > On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 10:59:47PM -0500, Stan Heckman wrote: > > On my system, date -d returns "invalid date" for dates before 1970. It > > is possible that this began when I upgraded libc6. Any suggestions? > > 1970-01-01 is time zero for *nixen. You're asking about what happened > before the big bang! Guess "date" is not as generally useful for > reformatting dates as it could be. However, its primary function is to > set/print the current date/time which is always more recent than 1970.
speaking of which, we missed a great opportunity to scare the wits out of the entire population a while back. remember y2k? that was just when a decimal digit was gonna flip from "1" to "2". big fat hairy deal. how about ADDING a whole new digit? that's a whole new ball of wax, and much more significant in the grand scheme of things. no, not y-10-k, that's a looong way off. time zero is 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC, right? well, guess when we passed time 999_999_999? $ perl -e 'print scalar gmtime 1_000_000_000;' Sun Sep 9 01:46:40 2001 Second-One-Gig was 9-september, a bit past midnight. where's cnn when you need them? we coulda had panic in the streets! cambells soup woulda been sold out! the networks coulda had a ball! never mind that the programming was intelligent from day one (as opposed to those falsely-lazy 2-digit years). why avert a panic when you can have RATINGS and pandelirium? -- I use Debian/GNU Linux version 3.0; Linux server 2.4.20-k6 #1 Mon Jan 13 23:49:14 EST 2003 i586 unknown DEBIAN NEWBIE TIP #41 from Colin Watson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> : Do you need to MASSAGE A BUNCH OF FILE NAMES? There's more than one way to skin a cat -- here are some examples of canonicalizing file names to lower-case: mmv \* \#l1 rename 'tr/A-Z/a-z/' * zsh -c 'for x in *; do mv "$x" "${x:l}"; done' (The "rename" command is a standard perl script, by the way.) Also see http://newbieDoc.sourceForge.net/ ... -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]