GNU bug report logs - #75682
ls -l sometimes shows a year in place of the hour and minute

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Message #5 received at submit <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Kasia <xo.okasia <at> proton.me>
To: "bug-coreutils <at> gnu.org" <bug-coreutils <at> gnu.org>
Subject: ls -l sometimes shows a year in place of the hour and minute
Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2025 01:01:15 +0000

[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]

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Hello Coreutils maintainers,

I believe I've found a bug in the coreutils' ls command.

I was watching a file with watch and ls -l while it was being updated, but sometimes I saw that the time would display a year instead of an hour and minute.

Later I reproduced this issue by doing the following:
- open a terminal emulator
- create two tabs
- run `touch test`
- in tab 1, run
either
while (true); do { ls -l test; }; done;
or
while (true); do { ls -l test | grep -F 2025; }; done;
- in tab 2, run
while (true); do {
 head -c 1 </dev/urandom | grep '[0-9]' | xargs -r -I LENGTH truncate -cs LENGTH test;
}; done;

One tab randomly changes the length of file, while the other shows ls -l of the tile.

In tab 1 I see this:
-rw-r--r-- 1 katarzyna katarzyna 9 Jan 20 00:57 test
-rw-r--r-- 1 katarzyna katarzyna 9 Jan 20 00:57 test
-rw-r--r-- 1 katarzyna katarzyna 9 Jan 20 00:57 test
-rw-r--r-- 1 katarzyna katarzyna 9 Jan 20 00:57 test
-rw-r--r-- 1 katarzyna katarzyna 2 Jan 20  2025 test
-rw-r--r-- 1 katarzyna katarzyna 2 Jan 20 00:57 test
-rw-r--r-- 1 katarzyna katarzyna 2 Jan 20 00:57 test
-rw-r--r-- 1 katarzyna katarzyna 2 Jan 20 00:57 test
-rw-r--r-- 1 katarzyna katarzyna 2 Jan 20 00:57 test

Do you know what might be causing this if it's my system instead of coreutils' ls?

x Kasia
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Message #8 received at 75682 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
To: Kasia <xo.okasia <at> proton.me>
Cc: 75682 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#75682: ls -l sometimes shows a year in place of the hour and
 minute
Date: Sun, 19 Jan 2025 21:17:43 -0800

On 2025-01-19 17:01, Kasia via GNU coreutils Bug Reports wrote:
> Do you know what might be causing this if it's my system instead of coreutils' ls?

It means the file's timestamp is in the future. This can happen if your 
file system's clock is a bit ahead of your kernel's clock. This is not 
uncommon in network file systems.

Of course this sort of thing can lead to problems with programs like 
'make', which rely on file timestamps. You can think of 'ls' as the 
canary in your mineshaft.

Message #11 received at 75682 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Bruno Haible <bruno <at> clisp.org>
To: Kasia <xo.okasia <at> proton.me>
Cc: 75682 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#75682: ls -l sometimes shows a year in place of the hour and
 minute
Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2025 11:06:20 +0100

Please give more details:
  - What's the result of
      df -T .
  - What's your libc version?
  - What's the result of
      uname -sr
  - What's the result of
      ls --version

I'm asking because three possible causes come to mind:
  - a network file system (mentioned by Paul Eggert),
  - the multi-grain time stamps introduced in Linux 6.13 [1],
  - a known glibc bug [2] that affects certain coreutils releases.

Bruno

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.13-Multigrain-Timestamp
[2] https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=30200

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