What is a leap second

[David Laight]

On Tue, Oct 29, 2002 at 05:50:10PM -0600, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 29, 2002 at 11:44:18PM +0000, David Laight wrote:
> 
> > What isn't clear (form the associated standards) is what you should do
> > to the system clock at the point the leap second is added/subtracted.
> > (Due to variations in the moment of intertia of the earth there
> > have been seconds added aas well as  subtracted, even though the earth's
> > rotation is slowing down because the moon keeps stealing angular
> > momentum from it.)
> 
> Well, if your system clock keeps proper time as measured in seconds since
> the epoch in UTC :), you don't need to do anything to the system clock;
> the leap seconds should then be applied when displaying time in the local
> time zone.

No - leap seconds have to be ignored when counting time the epoch.
Check the posix spec (www.opengroup.org for starters).

	David

-- 
David Laight: david at l8s.co.uk