JDK 9 doc-api-only RFR of 6791812: (file spec) Incompatible File.lastModified() and setLastModified() for negative time

[Stuart Marks]

On 5/19/17 11:59 AM, Brian Burkhalter wrote:
> https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-6791812
>
> --- a/src/java.base/share/classes/java/io/File.java
> +++ b/src/java.base/share/classes/java/io/File.java
> @@ -932,7 +932,9 @@
>       * @return  A <code>long</code> value representing the time the file was
>       *          last modified, measured in milliseconds since the epoch
>       *          (00:00:00 GMT, January 1, 1970), or <code>0L</code> if the
> -     *          file does not exist or if an I/O error occurs
> +     *          file does not exist or if an I/O error occurs; the value may
> +     *          be negative in which case its absolute value indicates the
> +     *          number of milliseconds before the epoch
>       *
>       * @throws  SecurityException
>       *          If a security manager exists and its {@link

This is "absolutely" pedantic, but the absolute value of Long.MIN_VALUE is 
Long.MIN_VALUE, which is still negative. A negative value for "milliseconds 
before the epoch" is confusing. It might be sufficient simply to say that 
negative values indicate a time prior to the epoch.

This is not outside the realm of possibility. For example, the Mac HFS+ file 
system represents time as seconds since January 1, 1904. It seems unlikely :-) 
that any Mac files were actually created between 1904 and 1970, but it is a 
possibility that somebody could have set a file's timestamp to a date in that range.

> The weird thing here is that if this method were invoked on a file last
> modified at 00:00:00 GMT, January 1, 1970, then we would not know whether the
> file does not exist or whether its last-modified time is the epoch. It seems
> to me that if the file does not exist it would be better to throw a
> FileNotFoundException but that is not an issue for JDK 9 at this stage of
> game.

I'll comment on this on the subsequent thread.

s'marks