odd timestamps on files when

[Charles Steinkuehler]

Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
> Has anyone seen anything else?  Files from the current year display the time
> instead of the year.  Same thing in ash and tcsh, the only other shells I
> have on this system.

AFAIK, this behavior is a "feature" of ls -l (at least it's discussed in 
the ls info file):

<quote>
      For
      files with a time more than six months old or in the future, the
      timestamp contains the year instead of the time of day.  If the
      timestamp contains today's date with the year rather than a time
      of day, the file's time is in the future, which means you probably
      have clock skew problems which may break programs like `make' that
      rely on file times.
</quote>

When I need to parse the file date/time from the shell, I use:
   ls --full-time

which outputs consistent fields.

<quote>
`--full-time'
      List times in full, rather than using the standard abbreviation
      heuristics.  The format is currently similar to that of `date',
      but this is planned to change in a future release, partly because
      modern file time stamps have more precision.  It's not possible to
      change the format, but you can extract out the date string with
      `cut' and then pass the result to `date -d'.  *Note `date'
      invocation: (sh-utils)date invocation.

      This is most useful because the time output includes the seconds.
      (Unix filesystems store file timestamps only to the nearest
      second, so this option shows all the information there is.)  For
      example, this can help when you have a Makefile that is not
      regenerating files properly.
</quote>

-- 
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net