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Chapter 7 - Time of Day Operations

UNIX Systems Programming for SVR4
David A. Curry
 Copyright © 1996 O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.

Chapter 7: Time of Day Operations
Overview
The UNIX operating system keeps track of the current date and time by maintaining the number of seconds that have elapsed since Thursday, January 1, 1970 at 00:00:00 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time, also called Greenwich Mean Time or Zulu Time). This number is stored in a signed long integer, which means that, assuming a 32-bit system, UNIX timekeeping will break on Tuesday, January 19, 2038 at 03:14:08 UTC when the value overflows and becomes negative.
There are a number of systems programming applications that need to know how to convert the UNIX time format to something that can be understood by humans. You encountered one of these applications in Chapter 5 Files and Directories, to print out file access and modification times. This chapter examines the functions that are provided to convert between UNIX time format and human-readable date and time strings.

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