Knowledge Base

Created 08 Apr 2002
Modified 08 Apr 2002

The internal date format has no problems with dates beyond 2000, and if the operation system supplies correct dates, everything should be fine. However some FTP servers return two-digit year values or no year value at all, in that case the software has to guess the correct year. Example:

No year specified (all UNIX style servers)

drwx------ 2 4659 100 512 Jan 30 21:46 .
drwx------ 2 4659 100 512 Jan 30 21:46 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 4659 100 3765 Jan 30 21:46 index.html

In this case, either the current year or the previous year is assumed, depending on the current date: "March" is interpreted as March '98 in February '99, whereas it would be interpreted as March 99 in May 99.

Two-digit only:

03-04-98 07:00PM <DIR> Explorer
03-05-98 04:24PM <DIR> Netscape

If the year is in a two-digit notation, years >= 50 are considered 19xx and years < 50 are considered 20xx.