From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A timestamp is a sequence of characters or encoded information identifying when a certain event occurred, usually giving the date and time of day, sometimes accurate to a small fraction of a second.[1] Timestamps do not have to be based on some absolute notion of time, however. They can have any epoch, can be relative to any arbitrary time, such as the power-on time of a system or some arbitrary time in the past.
A distinction is sometimes made between the terms datestamp (DS), timestamp (TS) and date-timestamp (DTS):
The term "timestamp" derives from rubber stamps used in offices to stamp the current date, and sometimes time, in ink on paper documents, to record when the document was received. Common examples of this type of timestamp are a postmark on a letter or the "in" and "out" times on a time card.
With the advent of digital data systems, the term has expanded to refer to digital date and time information attached to digital data. For example, computer files contain timestamps that indicate when the file was last modified, and digital cameras add timestamps to the pictures they take, recording the date and time the picture was taken.
Timestamps are usually presented in a consistent format, allowing for easy comparison of multiple records and the tracking progress over time; the practice of recording timestamps in a consistent manner along with the actual data is called timestamping.[2]
Timestamps are frequently used for logging events or in a sequence of events (SOE), in which case each event in the log or SOE is marked with a timestamp.
Practically all computer file systems store one or more timestamps in the per-file metadata.
In particular, most modern operating systems support the POSIX stat (system call), whereby each file has three timestamps associated with it:
time of last access (atime: ls -lu),
time of last modification (mtime: ls -l), and
time of last status change (ctime: ls -lc).
When some file archivers and version control systems copy a file from a remote computer to the local computer, they adjust the timestamps of the local file to show the date/time in the past when that file was created or modified on the remote computer, rather than the date/time when that file was copied to the local computer.
Timestamps are often found to be "dirty" in many cases.[clarification needed] Without cleaning up inaccurate timestamps, time-related applications such as provenance analysis or pattern queries are not reliable. To evaluate the correctness of timestamps, temporal constraints can be applied, declaring distance limits between timestamps.[3]
ISO 8601 standardizes the representation of dates and times.[4] These standard representations are often used to construct timestamp values.
Examples of date-timestamps:
Examples of datestamps:
Examples of timestamps:
Look up timestamp in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Timestamps.
3.5 Expansion … By mutual agreement of the partners in information interchange, it is permitted to expand the component identifying the calendar year, which is otherwise limited to four digits. This enables reference to dates and times in calendar years outside the range supported by complete representations, i.e. before the start of the year [0000] or after the end of the year [9999].
