On Thu, 6 Dec 2007, Florin Iucha wrote: > On Thu, Dec 06, 2007 at 12:52:59AM -0600, Mike Miller wrote: > >> Are you saying that newer 32-bit Linux distros have a new version of >> 'date' that can deal with 2038? > > I was implying that, but I was wrong. Both Ubuntu 7.10 and Centos 5.1 > 32 bit have the same problem you described. Which is kind of silly - > there is no inherent limitation in the formatting part of the date > program that would force it to use 32 bits on 32 platforms. I > understand that hardware it what it is and you can only set 32 bits... > But I suspect (maybe wrongly, again) that the old beards that maintain > coreutils would just close a potential bug submission with 'works as > intended' 8^) Thanks to both Florin and Elvedin for looking this up. Very interesting. I had no idea that this was how we would be dealing with the 2038 problem on some of these machines - by replacing them with 64-bit machines. It is really a software problem, but I guess it's much more easily resolved in a 64-bit architecture so programmers are crossing their fingers and hoping all the 32-bit machines will be gone before 2038 gets here! I won't be surprised if air traffic controllers are using in 2038 machines that they bought in 1997. Mike