cygwin sent the following at Friday, January 20, 2012 7:34 PM
I'm seeing a problem with my setup where the date command fails in an
odd way:
this is what it does: $ date -d '1 January 1900' date: invalid date `1
January 1900'
same thing on a linux box: $ date -d '1 January 1900' Mon Jan 1 00:00:00
PMT 1900
any dates after 1901 seem to work OK: $ date -d '1 January 1902' Wed Jan
1 00:00:00 PMT 1902
but nothing works before then:
$ date -d 'today - 150 years' date: invalid date `today - 150 years'
$ date -d 'today - 100 years' Sun Jan 21 01:33:27 WET 1912
this is the info for the date command:
$ date --version date (GNU coreutils) 8.14 Packaged by Cygwin (8.14-1)
Copyright (C) 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU
GPL version 3 or later<http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>. This is
free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO
WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
Written by David MacKenzie.
Where should I start debugging?
Start by finding out exactly when date stops working.
The followijng is the same date version, everything up to date, on
Windws 7:
/c> date -d 1901-12-13\ 15:45:52
Fri, Dec 13, 1901 3:45:52 PM
/c> date -d 1901-12-13\ 15:45:51
date: invalid date `1901-12-13 15:45:51'
/c> date -d 1901-12-13\ 15:45:51.999
date: invalid date `1901-12-13 15:45:51.999'
/c> date -d 1901-12-13\ 15:45:52.000
Fri, Dec 13, 1901 3:45:52 PM
So 1901-12-13 15:45:52 is the earliest that works Waiting a few minutes
and repeating does not change this.
When is that in seconds:
/c> date -d 1901-12-13\ 15:45:52 +%s
-2147483648
%s give the number of "seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC". So this
critical time is 2147483648 seconds before the start of the Unix epoch.
Now -2147483648 = -2^31. So it looks like cygwin date encodes seconds as
signed long integers. Presumably, date on your linux box was compiled to
use something bigger.
- Barry
Disclaimer: Statements made herein are not made on behalf of NIAID.