Why Is april 6th 1980 an invalid date?

[jjmt1974]

Dear friends,

I'm having problems with /bin/date command in kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (actually I ignore if they would also occur in other versions). Some dates seem not to be valid and I can't find out why:

...................
host$ date -d "19800405"
Sat Apr 5 00:00:00 WET 1980

host$ date -d "19800406"
date: invalid date `19800406'


host$ date -d "19800407"
Mon Apr 7 00:00:00 WEST 1980
....................

Does anyone know why April 6th 1980 is an invalid data in kubuntu?
Thank you so much for your hints,

Joan

[Linuxgirl]

Re: Why Is april 6th 1980 an invalid date?

Hi,

tried it and it works with me. So at least you know it's not a kubuntu issue...

anna@felix:~$ date -d "19800406"
Sun Apr 6 00:00:00 CET 1980

[dibl]

Re: Why Is april 6th 1980 an invalid date?

Confirmed here to:

dibl@cville:~$ date -d "19800406"
Sun Apr 6 00:00:00 EST 1980

Maybe the BIOS clock in your computer has some limitation?

[MoonRise]

Re: Why Is april 6th 1980 an invalid date?

Confirmed here to:

dibl@cville:~$ date -d "19800406"
Sun Apr 6 00:00:00 EST 1980

Maybe the BIOS clock in your computer has some limitation?

That would be my guess as well.

[Teunis]

Re: Why Is april 6th 1980 an invalid date?

It works on my Toshiba laptop.

[jjmt1974]

Re: Why Is april 6th 1980 an invalid date?


Strange....
I think it cannot be an BIOS issue:

I have four *IDENTICAL* pc's.
Two of them run Debian Linux and the other two run Kubuntu.

The ones running Kubuntu yielded:

basil@beltxa:~$ date -d "19800406"
date: invalid date `19800406'

And the ones running Debian:

basil@thunder:~$ date -d "19800406"
Sun Apr 6 00:00:00 GMT 1980

Could someone explain that?
Thanks for your comments



P.D.: just in case it was relevant, CPU's are all:

vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 2
model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz
stepping : 9
cpu MHz : 2992.746

All computers have the same BIOS version.

[dibl]

Re: Why Is april 6th 1980 an invalid date?

I think this goes in the "Book Of Unexplained Mysteries".

Really, I have no idea.

I know there have been some bugs in tzdata, and some updates of that package.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ta/+bug/116193

But that shouldn't affect dates in prior years, I don't think. I'm running 8.04 Beta, so that's the basis of my earlier post -- I see this is posted in 7.10.

If you can afford to do the experiment, you might try a 8.04 installation on one of those PCs, to see if the result is different.

:P

[MoonRise]

Re: Why Is april 6th 1980 an invalid date?

I have 7.10(3.5.9) and 8.04(4.0.2). Both report fine. I agree it goes to one of those unexplained. I Googled on this quite a bit and found nothing substantial.

[Snowhog]

Re: Why Is april 6th 1980 an invalid date?

No problem here either.

[Teunis]

Re: Why Is april 6th 1980 an invalid date?

You might try to run a Live CD on this one computer and see if it replicates.

If not then you probably have a flaky install.

[jjmt1974]

Re: Why Is april 6th 1980 an invalid date?



Thank you all for your comments.
I'll try to run a live CD as Teunis suggests.

This problem is being to me more serious than one might suppose. I'm trying to run some scripts which analyses a 50 year dataset and I do need to process dates (extracting year, month and day fields, for example).

Well, I'll keep trying for a while yet before I give up and install Debian on this computers too.
Regards,

[jjmt1974]

Re: Why Is april 6th 1980 an invalid date?


Happy end to this mistery (which is not the same as solved mistery)

Just for trying, I pointed the /etc/localtime to a different zoneinfo file (originally was WET time):

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/GMT /etc/localtime

...and 1980 april 6th has become valid again.

I don't know yet where the problem is but it works and I'm happy with it.

Thank all again
Jean

[Snowhog]

Re: Why Is april 6th 1980 an invalid date?

Well, at least you're 'satisfied.' Welcome to the Kubuntu Forums. You'll find a lot of help here.