All,

I was recently reminded that a Y2K like date was supposed to be sneaking-up on us when some dumb kid mentioned "What a hoax all that Y2K stuff was." As a veteran of all the hard work that kept major problems from happening, I promptly reprimanded him for the remark.
However it did remind me that I had meant to follow-up on something I had seen mentioned but didn't understand its full implications:
Do the ANSI C libraries really overflow on 1/1/2010 and if so, were any of the components of current Linux (or heck even UNIX, OSX or Windows) compiled with these? If so, this might get really ugly (it is pretty easy to sift through Cobol code and look for date strings, but trying to find out whether your mission-critical OS or app was compiled with a certain version of a standard library doesn't sound easy.)
I am really hoping that these libraries were replaced/upgraded/patched/etc a long time ago.


Thanks,
Growlor

There's no issue in 2010, but there's a 2038 bug: http://www.2038bug.com/faq.html

Moved: This thread is more suitable in General and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

and posted in Linux -> General by mistake.


Aldimeneira, are you sure? I really hope you are correct, but do a quick Web search for
"Overflow ANSI C library" Y2K
and you'll find several references to the date I mentioned. The reason I am not sure if its true or not is they all look like copies of the same thing. So its possible the guy who created that just goofed-up and a bunch of people copied him. I am hoping someone knows for sure if this is an issue or just an error that got copied.

Thanks,
Growlor

ANSI C is a standard, not an implementation. There are many C libraries in existence that conform to the ANSI C specification (either the old version done sometime in the late '80s or the newer C99). Even if one library had some date overflow problem, there's no reason why any of the others would. I did a Google and one of the pages listing that problem reports it as "very dubious."

Most of the Unix C libraries (glibc etc.) expect the standard Unix way of tracking time (seconds from midnight UTC on Jan 1, 1970). As mentioned above, this date is good through 2038 if time_t is represented as a 32 bit signed integer. Systems with 64 bit time_ts are good for much, much longer (longer than the expected lifespan of the universe IIRC).

Some information on this topic (not the 2010 one):

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question75.htm

It makes some comments about Windows and Mac systems, too.