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Time Trouble


Last Friday I had a moment of panic. While investigating why different run-time libraries might interpret file timestamps differently, I noticed that even Windows doesn’t always agree with itself.

Now it’s early March, and for files last written in recent months, the timestamps matched between cmd and Explorer. It is highly likely that cmd uses the FileTimeToLocalFileTime API, for which Microsoft has a rather interesting Remarks section in their documentation: In either case, DST will be handled correctly ( SystemTimeToTzSpecificLocalTime and localtime() both do the right thing)… and the local times will not always match what cmd shows.

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Time Trouble