I was reading through the man
page of ls
on UNIX, specifically OS X Mavericks. This got me intrigued:
If the modification time of the file is more than 6 months in the past
or future, then the year of the last modification is displayed in
place of the hour and minute fields.
Why would someone set the modification time to the future?
Best Answer
It all depends on the point of reference. Maybe it's not the file that has a modification time in the future, maybe it's the user looking at the file who's living in the past?
Otherwise, filesystem can be used to store arbitrary data, and files can have arbitrary attributes (e.g. with
xattr
on OS X), so, maybe someone wants to store calendar-like data in the filesystem, and represent the events through the modification time attribute?