On Sun, 26 May 1996, VaX#n8 wrote:

> 31Dec69 would put it just before the epoch, so maybe it's a negative number
> (0xFFFF....).

More likely it's zero, and you don't live in England (or, at this
time of year, somewhere in the Atlantic west of England :-)). PS
converts to local time before displaying the figure, which means
that in the western hemisphere the epoch is in the last few hours
of 1969, local time.

cjs

Curt Sampson    curt@portal.ca		Info at http://www.portal.ca/
Internet Portal Services, Inc.	
Vancouver, BC   (604) 257-9400		De gustibus, aut bene aut nihil.

> Date: Sun, 26 May 1996 01:33:52 -0500
> From: VaX#n8 <vax@linkdead.paranoia.com>
> To: John M Vinopal <banshee@gabriella.resort.com>
> Cc: current-users@NetBSD.ORG, vax@linkdead.paranoia.com
> Subject: Re: ps a -- date = 31Dec69 
> 
> In an ancient message you said:
> 
> In message <199603230235.SAA03000@gabriella.resort.com>, John M Vinopal writes:
> >On some netbsd machines I run, ps a gives all process dates as being
> >31Dec69.  What precisely causes this?  Do the kernel, libkvm, and ps
> >all have to come from the same compilation?
> >On one machine I've recompiled and installed libkvm, then ps to no 
> >effect.  Why does this seem to get so easily out of sync?
> 
> This happened to me recently.
> 
> to fix this.  Or maybe it was the fact that I booted of /netbsd.whatever
> instead of /netbsd.
> In any case, ps is reading the wrong thing, as you probably guessed.
>