Re: [cobalt-users] ws_ftp y2k?

[Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 02:31 PM 1/5/00  ISP wrote:

> Anyone notice how ws_ftp is displaying dates?
>
> While connected to a RaQ2 today's date on files is displayed as 1000105, ala
> the Perl 'bug' style.

There's an upgrade to ws_ftp Pro available.  It's on their website.  I 
don't think they're fixing Light; they don't seem to want to distribute it 
any more.

(This really isn't a Cobalt product issue.)

> The date command in telnet displays the correct date. Does the RaQ2 ftp
> daemon depend on some perl module or is it ws_ftp's doing?

The problem is in ws-ftp.

The problem is often found in programs written in perl only because people 
who write perl tend to be less experienced programmers than people who 
write in C and in C++.  Perl just uses the "localtime" primitives from C; 
the problem is that localtime returns the number of years since 1900, and a 
lot of programmers interpret it to be a two-digit number, so they implement 
it as (this is pseudocode):  year = number("19" + string(localtime(year)))
when it should be implemented as: year = 1900 + localtime(year)

Jeff
--
Jeff Lasman, nobaloney.net
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