# Hey, I'm a Time Lord!



## semi-ambivalent (Mar 23, 2018)

I have a USB stick that has been newfs_msdos'ed any number of times. I've been using it to backup a couple small files with a script. Just now I mounted it and, instead of doing an 'ls -l' I did 'ls -la' and what do I see but (in part) this:

drwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    16384 Dec 31  1979 .
drwxr-xr-x  19 root  wheel       27 Mar 14 11:11 ..

My first thought was tampering. I'm no mega-user but I think this has been isolated fairly well from that. I might just be delusional and ignorant. It's formatted as MSDOS, is that date fallout from that?
thanks!


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## robroy (Mar 23, 2018)

Time Lord, I was three months old when you made that directory.  

Would it be possible for you to send me back, leaving my adult mind intact?  

Thank you very much for this opportunity.


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## ShelLuser (Mar 23, 2018)

No tampering, it's quite common actually:


```
root@unicron:/mnt # ls -la
total 602930
drwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel      16384 Jan  1  1980 ./
drwxr-xr-x  20 root  wheel         26 Mar  4 04:37 ../
drwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel      16384 Jan 27  2016 Admin scripts/
```
1980 is about the moment FAT was developed and became a standard, which I suspect is related to this.


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## Crivens (Mar 23, 2018)

Could tell you, Timelord, but that would be cheating


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## semi-ambivalent (Mar 23, 2018)

robroy said:


> Time Lord, I was three months old when you made that directory.
> 
> Would it be possible for you to send me back, leaving my adult mind intact?
> 
> Thank you very much for this opportunity.



I'll save you the mileage. That time you said yes? It should have been no. That time you said no? It should have been yes.

It's the same for everybody. 
s-a


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## ralphbsz (Mar 24, 2018)

It's also not uncommon to see things in file systems that are from January 1, 1970 (ten years earlier), plus or minus a few hours.  And on an older operating system called "VMS", it was not uncommon to see things that claimed to be from November 1858.  Which is the day that Ken Olsen and Julius Cesar had a meeting to decide on the format for storing time in computers.  Of the three sentences above, two are true, and one is a joke that contains a large grain of truth.


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## ronaldlees (Mar 27, 2018)

Well, the FAT time format is complicated, and there are several versions.  Maybe, somewhere along the line, a file system driver had the wrong encoding for the version you have on your USB stick.

The FAT time is a 32 bit time-stamp busted up into sections of varying bits.  For instance, the year is in bits 31-25 -  relative to 1980 - for some versions.  Unix, on the other hand (so much more sensible) - uses a plain 32 bit integer with the seconds elapsed since the magic date.


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