Unix Epoch
Contents
Summary
The Unix Epoch is a different and unique way to represent dates.
Description
This way of representing dates counts the seconds passed since the 1st of January 1970 at 00:00:00 in UTC (Greenwich timezone)
This date can be possitive (for dates after 1970-1-1) or negative (for dates before 1970-1-1).
The most interesting about this way of representing dates, is that dates are, for the first time, turned into numbers.
Utility
Because it counts seconds since a very specific date, this way of representing dates is unique.
The "normal" way of representing dates is unique in a strange way, since there are various time zones and the same date represents different dates in different countries.
Examples
| Unix Epoch | Date |
| 252234223 | Thu, 29 Dec 1977 10:03:43 +0100 |
| 1108486591 | Tue, 15 Feb 2005 17:56:31 +0100 |
| 1101453443 | Fri, 26 Nov 2004 08:17:23 +0100 |
| 0 | Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100 |
| -234234234 | Mon, 30 Jul 1962 23:56:06 +0100 |
| -1954864745 | Tue, 21 Jan 1908 06:00:55 +0100 |
Notes
The Unix Epoch date is also called POSIX time or Unix time (or even simply Epoch).
It was defined as a 4-bytes integer, so it handles dates from 1901 to 2038 only. Nowadays it is being decided to move it to an 8 bytes integer, so it will be able to handle all the dates through the whole universe's life.
aMule uses Unix Epoch dates in clients.met file and server.met file amongst other places. So you might want to take a look there to get a better idea of the Unix Epoch concept.
