On Tuesday, July 5, 2005 at 6:59:04 PM +0200, Hrvoje Niksic wrote: > Am I completely off the mark, or can mktime_from_utc (or in fact > timegm) be replaced by something as simple as the following? Or is it > too good to be true?
It returns a number of seconds since epoch neglecting leap seconds. This number is later given to the system for file timestamps, display, and such. I believe this can unfortunately be wrong by about 22s on platforms without timegm() but counting leap seconds. Untested though. It seems many platforms directly or optionally account for leap seconds. Example Linux Woody by default neglects but optionally accounts leap seconds when timezone info comes from the right directory. | $ TZ=UTC date --date "9 Sep 2001 1:46:40 UTC" +%s | 1000000000 | $ TZ=right/UTC date --date "9 Sep 2001 1:46:40 UTC" +%s | 1000000022 The first is the common Posix simplification, the later is The Truth. By the way: After 7 years of stability, the IERS announced officialy that the next added leap second will be December 31 2005 23:59:60 UTC. Alain.
