Hi everyone !
First post on here since I've been lurking! I've been messing around with a piece of software called DCode and I basically copied out a value from firefox's downloads.sqlite file and used DCode to convert the 'unix numeric value' into a readable format.
Now, my question is, what exactly is 'unix numeric value' and why is firefox recording downloads in that format?
Sorry if this is a silly question, but I think it would be more silly if I didn't find out!
Thanks all,
Simon
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Why? One answer is space. To store a string of YYYY/MM/DD HHMMSS we would need at least 14 bytes (excluding separators). With Unix epoch time, we only need 4 bytes. That is less than 29% of the original storage space!
An other is calculation. It is much simpler to use seconds to represent time to add, subtract, divide, multiply then convert it to human readable. If we stored it in human readable, it would require conversion at least twice - convert to seconds, then perform math, convert back…
With Unix epoch time, we only need 4 bytes. That is less than 29% of the original storage space!
See you in two thousand and thirty-eight, alligate wink
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jaclaz
Now, my question is, what exactly is 'unix numeric value' and why is firefox recording downloads in that format?
The reason why Firefox has adopted a Unix time representation is probably one of expediency there's a lot of well-tested open-source code out there for handling and interpreting Unix timestamps that can be reused.
If you choose the other path, and invent your own time format, you will have to implement all that yourself. As well as test it.
thanks for the replies, much appreciated