SecureBlackbox 16: Why is the year reported incorrectly in directory listings?

The FTPS protocol doesn't have a standard format for directory listings (see the exception below). Many modern FTP systems use the so-called Unix listing format produced on Unix-based systems by the "ls" tool. This listing specifies the year only when the file is X days or more away from the current moment. If the file is closer to today than X days, then the time is listed instead and the year is omitted.

And herein lies the problem: The X is different on different systems. Some systems have X set to +/-183 days (i.e., 6 months in the past and 6 months in the future) while others have X set to -365 days. There is no way to know how this X is set on the remote system. SecureBlackbox uses the Linux approach with +/-183 days. macOS uses -365 days and there can be other combinations as well.

Example: If today is the 1st of July 2015 and the listing date is "19th of November" — is it 19 Nov 2015 or 19 Nov 2014? (Future dates are possible for files, yes?) The answer depends on the value of X. If X = +/-183 then it's November 2015, and if the value of X is -365 then it's November 2014.

In general, if you don't like how the ParseFileListEntry procedure works in the component, you can implement your own, more precise, parsing — that's all we can offer.

To address the problem, there was an MLST/MLSD extension introduced. It is supported by some but not all servers. The extension means that there are MLST and MLSD commands supported, and those commands produce results in a well-defined uniform format suitable for machine parsing.

If your server supports this extension, you can make use of the MLSD method to get the corresponding listings.

Additionally, there's a ListDirectory method in the recent versions of SecureBlackbox, which automatically chooses what command to use for the listing, so if MLSD is supported, you'll get correct listings with it.