Peter Simons
The computers timer should not attempt to adjust for leap seconds...
I seem to recall reading somewhere that leap second inserts are supposed to be represented as:
23:59:59 23:59:60 00:00:00
Yes, but Unix API doesn't use this. The OS communicates in terms of UTC seconds since the epoch (and microseconds / nanoseconds). Userspace translates between this and broken-down time (year, month etc.), and UTC doesn't have leap seconds. Userspace also takes timezones into account - the kernel reports UTC only. I don't know how it looks on other systems. On Linux it is possible to set timezones which assume that the system time is TAI instead of UTC, and translate it to UTC. In this case the local time can have tm_sec == 60. It breaks programs which rely on POSIX rules and perform the conversion themselves. I don't know how NTP clients handle this, and how many people actually use it in practice (it's not a default). -- __("< Marcin Kowalczyk \__/ qrczak@knm.org.pl ^^ http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/