lee@west44.UUCP (Lee McLoughlin) (03/12/84)
I was hoping someone could give me a definitive answer to the following:- What is the format of the date field in a "Bell" standard mail header. I'm talking about the mailer with all the "From" and ">From" lines. Of late I've been getting in mail which has the timezone in the From line which confuses some new mail software. Our V7 mailer calls ctime to generate a 26 (inc' newline and null) char string which is the date in GMT but without a "GMT" in the string itself. Is it permissable to have a timezone field? -- "The wizard of OS" Lee McLoughlin ....!ukc!root44!west44!lee ....!ukc!lmcl
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (03/13/84)
Anyone whose software assumes that there is some sort of "standard" format for the date in a "From " header is in for trouble. The V7 mailer and most of its descendants generate something which is more or less predictable, but there are other mailers in use that generate total weirdness in there. Making assumptions about the format of the date is unwise. -- Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry
fair@dual.UUCP (Erik E. Fair) (03/20/84)
If you want to keep standard, ctime(3) returns a 26 character, null terminated string as in the following example: Tue Mar 20 12:32:40 1984 This is the same on V7, System III, System V (that's what we're running), and all of the 4BSD systems. ANYONE who is putting timezone into ctime(3) output is violating the standard, and he/she/it will break a LOT of software. The `From' line in UNIX Mail also has a standard format that is of the form: From fair Tue Mar 20 12:38:16 1984 ARPAnauts will note with disgust that there is NOT a colon after the field identifier. Well, sorry guys, this is the way we doit in UNIX Land. The return address is the second field in the line, and it is delimited by one space on either side. The rest of the line is a date in ctime(3) format. Now, by way of example, a story: Once upon a time some hackers at Duke University noticed that ctime(3) produces two spaces between the Month and the day of the month when the day of the month was less than 10 (e.g. `Mar 3'). They decided this was ugly. They changed it to produce one space. When the first of the month rolled around, loud screams of anguish were heard from all over bangland. No one could read Mail from `duke'! It parsed all wrong. Insofar as I am aware, `duke' did the sensible thing, and changed back. Moral: Leave it the HELL alone! Erik E. Fair dual!fair@Berkeley.ARPA {ihnp4,ucbvax,cbosgd,decwrl,amd70,fortune,zehntel}!dual!fair Dual Systems Corporation, Berkeley, California