From: Klemens Nanni <kn@openbsd.org>
Subject: Re: ts(1) & ISO8601 by default (Was: httpd: add timestamps to fastcgi error log)
To: Job Snijders <job@bsd.nl>, tech@openbsd.org
Date: Mon, 02 Nov 2026 19:24:43 +0000

02.11.2026 16:16, Job Snijders пишет:
> Somewhat related: tools like ts(1) use strftime(3) for the format,
> but strftime(3) does not provide an easy single character conversion
> specification for ISO8601 timestamps. You have to do something like
> 'echo hi | ts %Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ', which is a bit long.
> 
> Does anyone see some way to improve on this? Some options I considered:
> 
> Adding an extra option to ts(1) seems less desirable because it would
> somewhat conflict with the interface people are used to.
> 
> Maybe just changing the default format in ts to '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ'
> might be better?
> 
> Or perhaps strftime(3) could be extended?

The more annoying part to me is that strptime(3) is unable to consume
milliseconds produced by syslogd(8) -Z and ts(1) (TIL it offers that).

So parsing zulu-timestamped syslogs in C gets ugly;  one hack I did
is looking for the ISO8061 part without %z and, if a dot plus three
digits follow, overwrite them with spaces to consume the scribbled
string via "...%s%t%z".

Hopefully this week I find some time and way to make our timestamps
round-trip safe without ugly hacks.