See a possible Y2K bug in shutdown

Sep 02, '03 10:17:00AM

Contributed by: robg

At least, I think this is a Y2K problem with shutdown. Reader David P. wrote:

Ouch, I have been bit by the millennium bug. I typed in the terminal:
sudo shutdown -h 0308210940
Password:
and got as a response
Shutdown at Fri Aug 21 08:40:00 1903.
According the the shutdown man page, the time field is defined as:
Time is the time at which shutdown will bring the system down and may be the word now (indicating an immediate shutdown) or specify a future time in one of two formats: +number, or yymmddhhmm, where the year, month, and day may be defaulted to the current system values. The first form brings the system down in number minutes and the second at the absolute time specified.
I tested this myself on two machines (both running 10.2.6), and got the same results as David. Some friends who should know tell me that it's been fixed in Panther, but I'm not aware of a workaround in 10.2 other than using the -h some_number option, where some_number is the number of minutes until shutdown.

Can someone else confirm this issue (are we both doing something wrong?), and/or provide any other workarounds?

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