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[20061019]
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On the edge of time
Unix counts the time in seconds since 'the epoch', i.e. Jan 1st 1970.
Given that the timecounting is usually done in an 32bit integer,
there's an upper limit for the number somewhen in the year 2038.
If you've always wondered how NetBSD and other BSDs react at that
very second,
see this report from M.K.
in copm.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
(found on Symlink).
While it's sort of known that there is a problem and that the time will
warp back, fixing this isn't so easy, as the data type used to store
the time in Unix is also used in many places on the harddisk, e.g.
the file access, modification and inode modification times for each
file on your harddisk would be affected. To move to some 64bit time_t,
basically all filesystems would need changing.
While modern filesystems are designed with this in mind, BSD's
FFS-based filesystems do have this issue, though, and will have to
come up with a solution in the next ~30 years.
Any takers? :-)
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