I have heard that in 2039? that the unix date will be too large for the operating system and unix will no longer be usable. anyone else heard of this or is it anothe y2k scare? thanks

32 bit time_t values have a max: Mon Jan 18 20:14:07 2038

The result above comes from epoch seconds = 2147483647.

This is largest positive value a 32 bit signed integer supports. If you add one to that value and then display it as a date/time value you get the earliest date your system supports.

There was a thread with code on this yesterday - search for it.

As a note: using a long long (64 bit) values for time_t extends the time range a bit.
The sun will have burned out when this happens to a 64 bit number....

So - no big deal, unless you want to keep a 1990's piece of unix hardware running for the next 31 years. Hmm. sounds like a lot of companies that still have DOS boxes for production code.....