this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
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Anyone who uses YYMMDD instead of ISO 8601 needs to be fed feet first into a wood chipper.
nah sideways
ISO 8601 is
YYYYMMDD(orYYYY-MM-DDin extended format)Are you really going to wood chipper someone for leaving off the leading
20? I think we can safely infer the century and millennium with a high confidence, why not trade them for two extra name characters?So, was the time of murder 20th of October 2021 - 1:25 PM or 21st of October 2020 - 1:25 AM?
Depending upon that, you may/may-not have an alibi.
We're just talking about the filename, the exact creation time is tracked by the OS. Plus I'd imagine most documents also have a time and date inside. The file name is mostly for sorting and human readability.
I recently had an accountant file something for the IRS that was dated as expiring in 1940 when it should've been 2040. I had to catch it myself after reading through 70 pages of dense forms before it was sent off, and I could've easily missed it.
Digital records have existed long enough now that it's downright irresponsible to leave off the century for anything where having an accurate date might even slightly matter.
The exact date of creation is usually preserved in the filesystem, we're just talking about what to name the documents themselves. The filename should be short and to the point, it gets truncated if it's too long, and on windows you only have 260 characters for the entire path to the file plus the name.
If two characters are hurting your 260 character limit then you have other more serious problems to contend with.
I use to do that but got tired of typing out unnecessary characters and appreciate the shorter character length. I think my folders and files will be long gone by Y2Point1K.
As an old person who has archives dating back to the 90s, yes.
are we just talking digital because i've inherited archives. my current one only goes back to the 1950s but in the next decades i expect to get some going back centuries.
Here you go gramps:
Did the software industry learn nothing from Y2K? Was it too long ago already for people to remember the mess we made for ourselves?
Saving two characters in a file name is not worth the hell you are leaving in your trail by shoving this nonsense in an obscure corner of production code that people are going to forget about until it's too late.
Their grandchildren will be pissing on their graves over it.
I often wonder what files may outlive me.
People have kept old physical remnants. There are obviously famous examples but there are far more mediocre examples.
All the unique content I've created fits on a modestly sized hard drive so keeping it around would be trivial compared to maintaining all those physical remnants.
It's just a filename, calm down. The created by date is tracked by the file system and the repo.
And you assume that changes to filesystems, new filesystems being created or other such things won't at some point create a edge case that creates a problem?
When you could just be safe? Sounds stupid as fuck to me to blindly trust nothing will happen to create problems.
I understand you feel very strongly about four digit years, but I really don't see any situation that I couldn't sort out with a simple script.
Usually I don't put dates in file names in the first place, but when I do I use the UTC timestamp; a date without a timezone is inherently fuzzy, and it's easier to compare and differentiate numerical times.
If someone used two digit years in their naming convention I wouldn't even blink, let alone get the woodchipper, life is too short to get angry over stuff like that.
Until people start applying the same logic everywhere for consistency, not just in file names.
So do I, but I don't think I need to worry too much about confusing them with 2090.
Now the alphabetical view doesn't sort them by date
Just you wait...
I mean, I could hope to live that long!
I like my
YYYY.MM.DD-textformat and you can sue me for itDots are reserved for filetype information, heathen.
I make a point to train people on this at work, and I also make a point to periodically delete all relevant files that are not dated or not dated correctly
oh no you lost some important files? should've followed the standards
we only have so much space and your 1.2 GB undated file that isn't even in the folder it should be in is getting deleted
one place i was at had ridiculous formatting standards. but like i loved that i could tell everything in a document by reading its title. just, when your pdf scan of your supporting documents for your tax return is 135 pages long, well the title took ten minutes to read
it was like 2010 tax return supporting documents + w2 - john doe - abc corp + w2 - john doe - def corp + 1099INT - john doe - BankBank +...pdf
and one of my jobs was to double check that the title accurately represented all 135 documents in that godsforsaken supporting documents scan. That was a rough year.
Other firm i worked at that year, because i was stupid and moonlit at TWO tax firms one tax season, just called the file SUPPORTING DOCS.pdf . Typed everything in all caps because we thought the IRS was blind. Also allowed us to stream music online and not have to play it on headphones with our doors shut in our offices. They were better.