[time-nuts] Leap Quirks

Chuck Harris cfharris at erols.com
Sun Jan 4 00:27:42 UTC 2009


Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> In message <495FD637.5030105 at erols.com>, Chuck Harris writes:
> 
>> Ok, that is news to me.  Are you saying that (pulling a number out of
>> the air) time_t = 21120123 could be followed by 21120123 on a year where
>> we added a leap second?
> 
> Apart from the number, that is exactly what happens: The last
> second of the (UTC) day is recycled twice.

As far as I remember, and as far as I can tell, what you are saying
violates both the unix and POSIX definition of time_t.

So to check, I pulled out both of my K&R editions of "The C programming Language"
and I did a quick google on time_t, and all of the sources I have found
concur that time_t is the number of seconds since 1/1/1970 UTC without
regard to leap seconds.

When did this change?

-Chuck Harris




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