[LEAPSECS] operational time -- What's in a name?

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Fri Mar 28 16:23:54 EDT 2008


In message <20080328201301.GA20923 at cox.net>, Greg Hennessy writes:

>> Well, time_t is UTC, which two unfortunate problems.

>

>Is it? I always thought it was a count of the number of seconds since

>the start of the unix epoch, not counting leap seconds.



] Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) includes leap seconds. However,
] in POSIX time (seconds since the Epoch), leap seconds are ignored
] (not applied) to provide an easy and compatible method of computing
] time differences. Broken-down POSIX time is therefore not necessarily
] UTC, despite its appearance.

More at A.4.14 in:

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/xrat/xbd_chap04.html


--
Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
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