note 58404 added to function.stat

There's an important (yet little-known) problem with file dates on Windows and Daylight Savings. This affects the 'atime' and 'mtime' elements returned by stat(), and it also affects other filesystem-related functions such as fileatime() and filemtime(). During the winter months (when Daylight Savings isn't in effect), Windows will report a certain timestamp for a given file. However, when summer comes and Daylight Savings starts, Windows will report a DIFFERENT timestamp! Even if the file hasn't been altered at all, Windows will shift every timestamp it reads forward one full hour during Daylight Savings. This all stems from the fact that M$ decided to use a hackneyed method of tracking file dates to make sure there are no ambiguous times during the "repeated hour" when DST ends in October, maintain compatibility with older FAT partitions, etc. An excellent description of what/why this is can be found at http://www.codeproject.com/datetime/dstbugs.asp This is noteworthy because *nix platforms don't have this problem. This could introduce some hard-to-track bugs if you're trying to move scripts that track file timestamps between platforms. I spent a fair amount of time trying to debug one of my own scripts that was suffering from this problem. I was storing file modification times in a MySQL table, then using that information to see which files had been altered since the last run of the script. After each Daylight Savings change, every single file the script saw was considered "changed" since the last run, since all the timestamps were off by +/- 3600 seconds. This one-liner is probably one of the most incorrect fixes that could ever be devised, but it's worked flawlessly in production-grade environments... Assuming $file_date is a Unix timestamp you've just read from a file: <?php if (date('I') == 1) $file_date -= 3600; ?> That will ensure that the timestamp you're working with is always consistently reported, regardless of whether the machine is in Daylight Savings or not. ---- Manual Page -- http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.stat.php Edit -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=edit+58404 Delete: added to the manual -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+58404&report=yes&reason=added+to+the+manual Delete: bad code -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+58404&report=yes&reason=bad+code Delete: spam -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+58404&report=yes&reason=spam Delete: useless -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+58404&report=yes&reason=useless Delete: non-english -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+58404&report=yes&reason=non-english Delete: already in docs -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+58404&report=yes&reason=already+in+docs Delete: other reasons -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+58404&report=yes Reject -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=reject+58404&report=yes Search -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php