200(0) Ancient UNIX Licenses

Warren's note reminds me of a few other Y2K bugs I've spotted that affect ancient UNIX: - date: no way to set the date past 1999 unless in the present year, because two-digit input. - at and atrun: commands are stored in the spooling directory with names of the form YY.DDD.HHMM.xx, where xx is a unique number. This one is trickier to fix, because the filename is already exactly 14 characters, so there's no room for expansion. (On V10, I just rewrote the programs to use a simple UNIX time expressed as a decimal number. A simpler solution might be to print the year in hex.) - Perhaps least consequential and most amusing: nroff and troff store the year in a number register. The manual says it contains `the last two digits of the year,' and many macro packages assume that is true, but the truth is that it contains (year-1900), the same as tm_year. So, for example, when I ran man on New Year's Day, I was told that the manual page had been printed on 1/1/100. I was about to fix the various troff macro packages when I noticed that the manual implied that I shouldn't. I asked Brian Kernighan for an opinion (since the code and the manual were both last touched by him); he thinks the best view is that the manual is just wrong and the macro packages should be fixed. \n(yr is a read-write register, so `.nr yr \n(yr+1900' is probably the easiest fix, though Brian points out that it's not always the right one (maybe you really wanted a two-digit year). If anyone is interested I can pass along a more detailed note from Brian. Received: (from major@localhost) by minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au (8.9.3/8.9.3) id CAA33653 for pups-liszt; Wed, 5 Jan 2000 02:17:48 +1100 (EST)