How to determine what date time format the system is using?

Question

For my centralized logging purposes for an application that will be used over the network(no server side application involved, yet) I am required to also store the time at which a particular event occurs. The task is pretty much easy but the problem is, as I have noticed, the computers over the network don't have their time setup accurately. Therefore in order to standardize the time I choose to grab it from the NAS using net time \\nas. All's good to this point.

Now the problem is, the format in which net time returns the time is dependent on the the particular system's datetime format, on which the application is run, which is guaranteed to be consistent, and therefore rendering a hard coded dateformat conversion to timestamp useless. Any solutions and opinions?

Can't use this solution since I am coding in python.

Linux or Windows? The easiest way is to configure your clocks with the same time, this is achieved with software which automatically set's the time from internet server. Do you have direct access to the different machines? — nacholibre, May 24 '13 at 07:58
@nacholibre Windows. It's not a feasible option right now since I am not the network admin and that every user doesn't have access to the internet nor does everybody have system level admin privileges. — Bleeding Fingers, May 24 '13 at 10:34

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:20

The output I was getting from net time \\nas is in the following format:

Current time at \\nas is dd/mm/yyyy HH:MM:SS

Local time (GMT) at \\nas is dd/mm/yyyy HH:MM:SS

The command completed successfully.

The following approach got me what I needed:

import subprocess
import time
import datetime
from _winreg import *
from dateutil.parser import parse

def runProcess(exe):
    p = subprocess.Popen(exe, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)
    while(True):
      retcode = p.poll() #returns None while subprocess is running
      line = p.stdout.readline()
      yield line
      if(retcode is not None):
        break

def nasTime():
    for line in runProcess(r"net time \\nas".split()):
        timeLine = line
        break
    timeLine = timeLine.split("is ")[1].replace("\r\n", "")
    hKey = OpenKey (HKEY_CURRENT_USER, r"Control Panel\International")
    value, type = QueryValueEx (hKey, "sShortDate")
    dayFirst = str(value).lower().startswith("d") # tells if day first format was being used
    return time.mktime(parse(timeLine, dayfirst = dayFirst).timetuple())

Code stolen from here(runProcess) and one other place I can't recall.

How to determine what date time format the system is using?

1 Answers1