Red Hat 6.5: Leap Day 29.02.2016 Impact on the Linux Machine

navkanwal · October 15, 2015, 10:29pm

Hi Experts

Is there any impact on the Linux Machine with respect to the Leap Day {29.02.2016}, which would be introduced next year as part of the Leap Year {2016}.

From my application scope, I see no problems.

Please comment.

Regards
Navkanwal

cjcox · October 16, 2015, 11:26am

Shouldn't be a problem.

Don_Cragun · October 16, 2015, 11:41am

If you have code running on your system that assumes that February always contains 28 days, you might have a problem. There shouldn't be any code provided as part of your Linux system that would do that. But we have no way of knowing whether or not any code that you have written yourself or any code that you have picked up from someone else handles date calculations correctly.

navkanwal · October 26, 2015, 2:17am

Thanks Experts.

My application code is not impacted, so I wanted to be sure about the OS itself.
Is their any document explaining the Calendar handling for Leap Year?

Regards
Navkanwal

Don_Cragun · October 26, 2015, 4:05am

As always, Wikipedia is a good place to look for stuff like this: leap year

rbatte1 · October 27, 2015, 4:34am

You may need to ensure that you don't use the Julian date somewhere and assume that 1st March is day 60 and on through to 31st December being day 365.

The OS will have no problems in itself because it is probably always counting time based on seconds from 1/1/1970 anyway.

Regards,
Robin