Timestamp Time Difference

[Mingwei Jiang]

Hi,

My program runs on one remote unix machine. And I use

   String today = new Timestamp(System.currentTimeMillis()).toString(); 

to get the timestamp. But weird thing is it prints out a very strange value, different from the output using the date command on unix.

When issue a date command on bash, it prints: Fri Aug 10 01:51:21 GMT 2007

But java program prints: 2007-08-10 15:51:07.372

My local time is: 2007-08-10 16:51:00

Why java gave me such a strange value which is different from either the remote server time and my local time?

Thanks

[Kail Limas]

look at the toString mehtod. It returns the nanoseconds too.

[Jesper de Jong]

The date command prints the time in GMT.

Your Java program prints the time in your local timezone, but probably without taking summertime into account. The ".372" are the milliseconds.

Try this to see in which timezone Java prints the time and date:

Date now = new Date();
 
DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss z");
 
System.out.println(df.format(now));

If you want the date and time printed in a specific timezone, you can set the timezone on the DateFormat object. For example:

Date now = new Date();
 
DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss z");
df.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("GMT"));
 
System.out.println(df.format(now));

[Mingwei Jiang]

Thank you guys! I got it. Jesper is right. Java printed my local time and took summer time into consideration.

Actually my Java program was wrapped into another main program, and it took care of the time thing. That's why I had the confusion.

Thanks