Wednesday, August 12, 2009

What is epoch time?

The Unix epoch (or Unix time or POSIX time or Unix timestamp) is the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1, 1970 (midnight UTC/GMT), not counting leap seconds (in ISO 8601: 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z). Literally speaking the epoch is Unix time 0 (midnight 1-1-1970), but 'epoch' is often used as a synonym for 'Unix time'. Many Unix systems store epoch dates as a signed 32-bit integer, which might cause problems on January 19, 2038 (known as the Year 2038 problem or Y2038).

Human readable time  Seconds
1 minute 60 seconds
1 hour 3600 seconds
1 day 86400 seconds
1 week 604800 seconds
1 month (30.44 days) 2629743 seconds
1 year (365.24 days) 31556926 seconds

More info on epoch can be read at http://www.epochconverter.com/

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