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#1 2011-07-06 08:35:59

calle
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2008-11-14
Posts: 45

Files from the future

Hej,

I recently was checking user accounts that haven't been accessed for a while by checking for the newest files in the users directories. I was a bit confused by the fact that there appear to be files from the future (from years 2015 to 2038 (Jan 19th, interestingly)). A file found on quite some accounts was called bookmarks.xml.tbcache which seems to to have sth to do with kde. Others have the extension vcf, which, according to google, is a file extension for address book-files. I can't think of a proper explanation for that phenomenon. Any thoughts or ideas?

Thanks!

Last edited by calle (2011-07-06 09:19:51)

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#2 2011-07-06 09:04:03

RaisedFist
Member
From: Romania
Registered: 2007-01-30
Posts: 556
Website

Re: Files from the future

maybe some people came back from the future and messed up with your computer big_smile /s

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#3 2011-07-06 10:51:41

thisoldman
Member
From: Pittsburgh
Registered: 2009-04-25
Posts: 1,172

Re: Files from the future

I have never had files whose timestamps were years off.  I do have some ideas about what may cause the timestamp errors.  It would be interesting to see what 'stat' says about an affected file.

Were, or are you, dual booting?  I've occasionally had some timestamp confusion occur when I've accessed or created files while using a Live CD.

Is your hwclock (BIOS clock) set to UTC or local time?  Have you changed rc.conf settings for time after the strange files were created?

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#4 2011-07-07 20:13:26

calle
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2008-11-14
Posts: 45

Re: Files from the future

hej,

there has been no dual booting or usage of a live cd on the affected machines. the files are however potentially accessible via samba. apparently all the affected files are somehow kde-related. they all reside under ~/.kde/share/apps/*
all files under ~/.kde/share/apps/kabc/ have weird dates. some dating back from 1970, others from far in the future.
stat says for example:

  File: `/home/username/.kde/share/apps/kabc/std.vcf_3'
  Size: 0             Blocks: 0          IO Block: 262144 regular empty file
Device: 14h/20d    Inode: 1073810440  Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--)  Uid: ( 1140/username)   Gid: (  100/   users)
Access: 1970-01-01 01:00:00.000000000 +0100
Modify: 2021-05-22 16:39:08.000000000 +0200
Change: 2011-04-27 13:08:54.753550813 +0200

the system is not arch but a debian system, if that matters. i don't know how to check for localtime or hwclock on debian though.
thanks,

calle

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#5 2011-07-07 20:35:00

Inxsible
Forum Fellow
From: Chicago
Registered: 2008-06-09
Posts: 9,183

Re: Files from the future

Well if you are using Debian, the folks at debianforums.org will be better able to assist you since they are better tuned in with Debian. Some folks here use debian but not all, so the chances of finding answers here are minimal at best. We at arch linux forums do not support any other distro.


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