James Youngman writes:
>
> This makes me a bit nervous. The current offset between UTC and TAI
> is about 31 seconds. I always wonder if this means that the apparent
> time of the Unix "epoch" has moved, and whether this depends on
> whether or not your C library knows about all the leap seconds
> (e.g. do clever/stupid C libraries differ on the time_t value for that
> date?). One of these days I'll sit down in a quiet darkened room and
> think about it :-)
The Posix/SUS standards dictate that leap seconds be ignored. Thus, the
apparent time of the epoch has not moved and the C libraries on such
systems are apparently forbidden from knowing anything at all about leap
seconds. (With the net result being that some Unix seconds are/were
actually two seconds long in real life.)
-Larry Jones
Can I take an ax to school tomorrow for ... um ... show and tell? -- Calvin
