Bug 35634 – coreutils 5.0.91 - date behaves unexpectedly

• Status: RESOLVED UPSTREAM
• Product: Gentoo Linux

[Description Nicolai Lissner 2003-12-11 18:37:11 UTC]

the "date" command from coreutils behaves different as expected:

date -d "date -d "1970-01-01 00:00: $timestamp CEST"
does not work anymore.

for example:
date -d "1970-01-01 00:00: 1071197001 UTC"
should return:
Fri Dec 12 02:43:21 UTC 2003
...and it does with coreutils 5.0

but with coreutils 5.0.91 it just returns
Do Jan  1 00:00:59 UTC 1970

and this output does not change for any timestamp > 59

Does anyone know if this is a bug?
Or is that an intentional change of the behaviour?
Maybe to achieve more POSIX compliance?
Who know more about this?

[Comment 1 Seemant Kulleen (RETIRED) 2003-12-11 18:49:36 UTC]

I can not duplicate your error, it works with coreutils-5.0-r5, coreutils-5.0-r6 and coreutils-5.0.91-r2

[Comment 2 Ciaran McCreesh 2003-12-11 19:52:44 UTC]

Hmm, well I can duplicate it :)

ciaranm@snowdrop ciaranm 0 $ qpkg -v -I coreutils
sys-apps/coreutils-5.0-r5 *
ciaranm@snowdrop ciaranm 0 $ date -d "1970-01-01 00:00: 1071197001 UTC"
Fri Dec 12 01:43:21 GMT 2003
ciaranm@snowdrop ciaranm 0 $ accept sudo emerge coreutils
(yada yada)
ciaranm@snowdrop ciaranm 0 $ qpkg -v -I coreutils
sys-apps/coreutils-5.0.91-r2 *
ciaranm@snowdrop ciaranm 0 $ date -d "1970-01-01 00:00: 1071197001 UTC"
Thu Jan  1 01:00:59 BST 1970

Playing with gvimdiff doesn't show anything obviously changed between the
source files. Looks like anything > 59 for the timestamp is broken.

ciaranm@snowdrop ciaranm 0 $ date -d "1970-01-01 00:00: 59 UTC"
Thu Jan  1 01:00:59 BST 1970
ciaranm@snowdrop ciaranm 0 $ date -d "1970-01-01 00:00: 60 UTC"
Thu Jan  1 01:00:59 BST 1970

If no-one's figured it out by the time I get my hands on a monitor that can
do > 1024x768 (silly laptop, how am I supposed to use an editor on that?) I'll
start tinkering with the source files some more...

[Comment 3 Josh Grebe (RETIRED) 2003-12-12 10:55:21 UTC]

Ok, tracked this down to around like 452 in src/date.c

when.tv_sec = get_date (datestr, NULL)

this knocks the seconds to a max of 59. get_date is in libs/date.c, which is made from libs/date.y, and requires more looking... Just an update...

[Comment 4 Matt Taylor 2003-12-12 11:41:39 UTC]

$ date -d "1970-01-01 00:00: 1071197001 UTC"
Thu Dec 11 21:43:21 EST 2003
$ qpkg -v -I coreutils
sys-apps/coreutils-5.0.91-r2 *

[Comment 5 Josh Grebe (RETIRED) 2003-12-18 14:29:45 UTC]

This looks to be an intentional change. The way to achieve this same function is to use something like:
date -d "1970-01-01 00:00:00 + 1071760000seconds UTC"

[Comment 6 Seemant Kulleen (RETIRED) 2003-12-29 20:07:20 UTC]

does coreutils-5.0.91-r3 (just checked into portage) exhibit this as well?

[Comment 7 Josh Grebe (RETIRED) 2003-12-30 20:54:36 UTC]

It does on my system...

[Comment 8 Nicolai Lissner 2004-01-01 16:08:14 UTC]

Yes, it does here, too.
Although Josh Grebe's version of the commandline runs here fine, too 
(it should do on ANY version before)

[Comment 9 Seemant Kulleen (RETIRED) 2004-02-21 16:23:35 UTC]

it's an intentional change upstream, probably for more POSIX compliance again (sigh).