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Hi Bruce,
It may not be as easy as changing to unsigned as negative values have
meaning. If you call a function such as ctime() passing a negative value
you will receive in some implementations a date prior to 1970 (-100000 for
instance is Tue Dec 30 20:13:20 1969) so you may find various library
functions not working exactly as expected... and most developers using
time_t would probably also be using the C runtime library.
In my experience, it's VERY rare that someone does this. The computers
that generate the timestamps are almost never set to date prior to 1970,
so it'd be very odd for log entries to have dates like this.
For historical dates, like birthdates, it's usually desirable to be able
to go further back than Dec 1901. Though, I suppose nowadays it would
work, but back in the 80's when a lot of this software was designed, it
wasn't acceptable, so people didn't use integers to calculate their dates.
Consequently, almost all of those dates are stored as character fields.
Obviously, for those who are using the negative values in their
timestamps, it's important to change to a different method of storing the
dates.
But, I can't see why a date in a filesystem would ever have a need for a
signed integer.
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