next one is in 3 years
Woah, is that weird that it's exactly on the hour? ...I guess not so weird, since 180 is divisible by 60.
By way of analogy, imagine we implemented leap years by slowing our clocks to half speed on Feb 28 instead of adding a Feb 29.
Thanks I will imagine this! Too bad we can’t slow the real Earth time down and have a bizarrely slow and long day every 4 years.
But it would matter if I wanted something to take 60mins and then set a start time and an end time.
Dates and timezones are the worst! :-)
You can do things like find midnight GMT by checking (t % 86400 == 0) for example.
In fact, UTC will change its leap second logic much sooner than Unix time logic, so UTC logic will be more like Unix time.
This. If anyone is interested in a source:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-leap-seconds-...
When you run "date", it asks the system for this number of seconds, then uses a database to look up what that number corresponds to in the local timezone, accounting for leap years and seconds, and spits out that value. So when (some of us) recently "fell behind", the Unix time incremented by 1 second, but that database told us that the time had decreased by an hour.
Not exactly sure how Windows does it, but I recently set up monitoring of a job that Task Scheduler runs, starting at midnight and running for 1 day, every 5 minutes. I got paged at 11:30 because the scheduler decided "1 day" is "24 hours", and it stopped running it at 11pm because of the time change, but didn't start the one for the next day.
I know cron can be confusing, but I'll take it any day over this.
Wrong. UNIX time is number of days since epoch × 86400 + seconds since beginning of day.
In real world some days have been actually 86401 seconds long, which means that UNIX timestamp is (currently) 37 less than number of seconds since epoch.
If you're dealing with human activity, UTC will usually be the easiest choice. If you're just dealing with computers, TAI (or one of its fixed-offset variants like UNIX time) will usually be the easiest choice.
Wrong again. UNIX time definitely is not fixed offset from GPS time. Here is handy dandy conversion tool between the two: https://bag-of-tools.com/gps-time-converter/
1700000000 UNIX = 1384035218 GPS
700000000 UNIX = 384035207 GPS
You'll also need to correct it in the time(2) man page, which says:
"number of seconds since the Epoch, 1970-01-01 00:00:00 +0000 (UTC)." (ubuntu 22.04)
POSIX.1 defines "seconds since the Epoch" using a formula that
approximates the number of seconds between a specified time and
the Epoch. [...] This value is not the same as the actual number of
seconds between the time and the Epoch, because of leap seconds
and because system clocks are not required to be synchronized to
a standard reference [...] see POSIX.1-2008
Rationale A.4.15 for further rationale
The word approximates is carrying a lot of weight here. So basically "seconds since the epoch" is a posix codephrase which doesn't actually mean what you'd naively think it does. Why this useful info is buried in the VERSIONS section instead of the main DESCRIPTION I don't know.
For Wikipedia, there is already discussion about the confusing wording of the opening paragraph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Unix_time#Flat_out_wrong? but the body of the article is mostly better, and especially the table showing what happens during leap second should clarify matters.