devbox@COMPUTEC The Computec development blog

18Feb/100

The real Y2K problem: LongInt Unix-Timestamps

On January 19th 2038 I'll be 63 years, 9 months and 23 days old. So unfortunately there are still a couple of days until I can think about retirement. What's wrong with this date?

The Unix timestamp of 2038-01-19 03:14:07 is 2147483647. This is the maximum number that fits into the int4 data type. One second later we'll be getting integer overflow for any operations on Unix timestamps. Like getting the actual date from that Unix timestamp via dateAdd() in ColdFusion.