bug#7317: Bug in SLEEP command

[Jim Meyering]

Pádraig Brady wrote:
> On 02/11/10 16:41, Eric Blake wrote:
>> On 11/02/2010 09:46 AM, Андрей Передрий wrote:
>>>
>>> Hello guys!
>>>
>>> I found a bug in 'sleep' command.
>>
>>> As you can see - 'sleep' was terminated by himself after 24 days, 20 hours, 
>>> 26 minutes and 33 seconds.
>>> 24*24*3600 + 20*3600 + 26*60 + 33 = 2073600 + 72000 + 1560 + 33 = 2147193 
>>> seconds
>>> It seems like overflow.
>>> coreutils 6.10-6
>>> Debian 5.0.6
>>
>> Is your system 32-bit or 64-bit?  It makes a difference in determining
>> whether there is a bug in the OS sleep primitives (for example, we know
>> that 64-bit Linux has a bug where nanosleep with an extremely large
>> value will cause the kernel to overflow and sleep for the wrong amount
>> of time, but coreutils has workarounds in place for that).
>
> I had a quick look at the gnulib replacement which
> seems to assume 49 days is the worst case,
> whereas we now need to use 24 days?

Sounds reasonable.  It'd be good to document which kernel(s) are affected.
Have you reproduced it? (i.e., in a VM, changing the date, if that is 
sufficient)