On Wed, 21 Jun 2006, Stephen C Woods wrote:
I think that you can force a touch on the files in question, but I'mnot sure. Linux machines don't have a problem with it nor do AIX machines. The cutoff date is later than the Big Band era, the Unix time universe starts at 0000Z01Jan70 or for the Civilian world 1200 AM GMT Jan, 1, 1970 (remember this is before UTC was invented in the 90s so it was still called Greenwich Mean Time)
<scw>
Drifting off topic! My recollection of something I'd seen somewhere about this technical problem was that, if the dates could actually be presented, they would be somewhere in the 1940s thus predating the well-known UNIX baseline of "1 Jan 1970". (Hence my aside about "Big Band era".)
This would be because of poorly handled sign-wrapping on various timestamp fields, especially triggered when PC clients are writing files.
In other emails on this thread, a couple of people suggested a workaround for Solaris 8. I've just tried that... it worked... lo and behold it does indeed display dates of 1948.