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When would this be useful?


Fixing things like:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

Testing features like:

- night mode

- calendar 'today' visualisation on different days of month etc.

Cheating like:

https://smartphones.gadgethacks.com/how-to/hacking-time-spee...

https://www.raymond.cc/blog/how-to-extend-the-trial-period-o...

In that last link, #1 is actually (coincidentally, that wasn't in my search) the software submitted here.


When your printer can't print on Tuesdays: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619


Unit testing.


Or better, integration test where multiple executables are involved, making regular in-process mocking unusable.


I would need RunAsTimezone


On Linux (well, glibc, not sure about other libc implementations) you can just set the `TZ` environment variable before running the app. I wonder if Windows has something similar.


Financial quarter ends or year ends


Testing.

Maybe a bug only appears around midnight, or near Easter. This makes that easier to reproduce.


Gimme gimme gimme? ;)


Yep! You got my reference.

For all others, see [1] and [2] .

[1]: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man...

[2]: https://qht.co/item?id=15747313


You might be able to obtain reproducible behavior from a tool that insists on putting time stamps into its output, and has no options for reproducibility.

You might be able to get an indefinite extension for running some time-limited trialware.


Run some trail software forever.


But not all, the author says: I get many email messages that say something like "I tried to extend the trial period of xyz software with RunAsDate and it didn't work". Running a software with different date/time can be used for many legitimate purposes and for these purposes RunAsDate was created. I have never said implicitly or explicitly that RunAsDate can be used for extending the trial period of a software. For some shareware programs, RunAsDate might really work, but many shareware creators are smart enough to detect that the date/time was modified and when they detect the time change, they end the trial period immediately. Please don't bother yourself to send me a question about extending the trial period of a software, because these kind of messages are simply deleted without answering.


Back in school we used to use it to run SAS 9.4


Timed license or something? I’ve heard of SAS but have never used it. Any good?


Yeah, a free trial.

It's a niche statistical analytics programming language. Used by banks and pharmaceutical companies mostly because it makes it easier to audit things. The open source alternative would be R.


We have proprietary software that was registered until X date and the company went bust. Changing the date allows the software to run.


If you don't need to worry about updates or litigation, just reverse engineer the date check and crack it.


Sounds like a use case for Ghidra to be sure.




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