Sometimes I’m forced to question the sanity of my cow orkers. If you run our setup program and choose the option to set the time and date, you are presented with a string like “062716452005.40” As near as I can figure, that’s DDMMHHmmYYYY.SS, or translated into English, day, month, hour, minute, year, period, seconds. Besides the utterly moronic order of the elements in the string, the input routine has absolutely no flexibility in what you can enter and no error checking. Get one character wrong or miss a column, and you’re going to get a date and time that are utterly unlike what you expected, and you won’t find out until you exit the setup program and type “date”.
3 thoughts on “What were they smoking?”
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Shouldn’t that be MMDDHHmmYYYY.SS? With DDMM…. it would resolve to the 6th of the 27th month …
Oh right, month, day, hour, minute, year, second. That’s even worse.
See the date(1) unix man page for the origins of ths clever coding scheme.