[R] as.POSIXct problem?

[Suchandra Thapa]

On Fri, 2003-01-03 at 12:44, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk wrote:
    On Fri, 3 Jan 2003, Frank E Harrell Jr wrote:
    > I get NA for any day in 1969 or earlier.  Using a time other than midnight did not help.  So it's not a problem with time zone changes on a given day (thanks, Brian and Don for suggesting I look at that).
    
    Ahah, so Dirk's guess was right for your machine!  That's a new bug in
    some version of glibc, I suppose.  Exactly what OS are you running, and
    version of glibc (if you can tell)?
    
I believe the problem is that the glibc developers recently changed
mktime to return an error for any date before Jan 1, 1970.  The
rationale for this was to make the mktime function more compliant with
the ISO C standard so I believe the the new behavior is here to stay
barring a large amount of complaints. Unfortunately, this means that all
linux distributions will have this problem as they upgrade to newer
versions of glibc.
    
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Suchandra S. Thapa 
s-thapa-11 at alumni.uchicago.edu

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