Problem handling future timestamps?

[Jon Burgess]

On Thu, 2007-04-19 at 10:30 -0700, Wayne Davison wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 19, 2007 at 05:20:59PM +0100, Jon Burgess wrote:
> > I use rsync as a backup tool (via rsnapshot) and noticed that it had a
> > problem with a couple of files which had timestamps way off in the
> > future.
> 
> That's a unix-time limitation.  The current timestamp resolution can't
> represent anything past January 18, 2038.  Fixing that won't be simple,
> but should not really be needed for quite a few more years.
> 
> ..wayne..

I agree in part -- but the fact the the file exists on a current
filesystem goes to show that it is a problem which exists today. Other
tools like touch and ls clearly handle these timestamps with no problem.

I can obviously work around the problem by resetting the bad timestamps,
but I thought i'd raise it as an issue since it may be causing to rsync
to scan files unnecessarily in some cases.

Files do occasionally get broken timestamps for all kinds of reasons.

	Jon