strftime

esnagel · 09-12-2002, 03:36 PM

Why does the man page for strftime indicate:

%S The second as a decimal number (range 00 to 61).

How can there be 61 seconds? Heck, how can there even be 60 seconds (wouldn't that just be 0 seconds, with another minute)?

How will this mess up my ftp logs?

jeremy · 09-12-2002, 05:02 PM

The extra 2 seconds are to account for leap seconds and the pretty rare double leap seconds. What is a leap second?

Quote:

Civil time is occasionally adjusted by one second increments to ensure that the difference between a uniform time scale defined by atomic clocks does not differ from the Earth's rotational time by more than 0.9 seconds. Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), an atomic time, is the basis for civil time.

--jeremy

esnagel · 09-12-2002, 07:06 PM

Thanks! Luckily, php is pretty smart, so if I make the time using mktime, I can specify 61 seconds, and it'll add 1 minute and subtract the 60 seconds

Thanks!