Here are some examples of ctime usage in GNU InetUtils, starting with inetd (a single-threaded application):
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/inetutils.git/tree/src/inetd.c?id=aba8d6528e2577eee7fafab3c418ee5bd94c096b#n1710 This prints day of time of the system. While we could rewrite that to use strftime, that would complicate the code to support years < 1000 and years > 9999 as far as I understand. Another one is in logger, also a single-threaded application: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/inetutils.git/tree/src/logger.c?id=aba8d6528e2577eee7fafab3c418ee5bd94c096b#n301 The code discards day of week and year, but is otherwise okay for years 1000..9999. Another one is in syslogd: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/inetutils.git/tree/src/syslogd.c?id=aba8d6528e2577eee7fafab3c418ee5bd94c096b#n1211 https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/inetutils.git/tree/src/syslogd.c?id=aba8d6528e2577eee7fafab3c418ee5bd94c096b#n1343 There is another use inside libls, which is a bit more interesting: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/inetutils.git/tree/libls/print.c?id=aba8d6528e2577eee7fafab3c418ee5bd94c096b#n268 Overall, I'm not sure rewriting these to use sprintf/strftime is a clear improvement, as the code would be uglier. Maybe some wrapper will help. I don't like having code that rely on or trigger undefined behaviour though. Could gnulib's ctime replacement call abort() when year<1000 or year>9999? Another idea is to have gnulib's ctime augment the C standard to have ctime not be undefined but to return shorter and longer strings, which I believe is still consistent with the C standard? For example it would be permitted to return strings like "Wed Jun 30 21:49:08 623\n" or "Wed Jun 30 21:49:08 11147\n". Callers will need to make sure they handle string lengths != 26 though, but that could be documented for the gnulib replacement. I think this solution make sense for these examples, and is somewhat more in line with what the original wish may have been: "give me a english-centric human string representation of this time_t value in a known fixed format". /Simon
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