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Subject: |
date command |
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Date: |
Wed, 01 Jun 2011 13:11:14 -0400 |
The date command is very useful. A lot of features and options which I
take advantage of as I need them. Every once in a while I need to use
the command to convert a UNIX Epoch Date to a normal date, so I attempt
to use the command as:
date -d 1306947372
Which results in the error message, "date: invalid date `1306947372'".
Neither 'date --help' or 'man date' shows that the command should have
been written as:
date -d @1306947372
I needed to do a Google search to see what I was doing wrong. (My memory
is not as good as it used to be!) ;^)
I don't know why this ('@') is needed, since the date command recognizes
many different date formats without specifying the format. For
completeness of the help and man page, please add a line explaining that
when passing a UNIX Epoch Date to the -d option, you need to prefix the
date with a '@'.
Thank you for your time and consideration!
Cheers!
Rick
--
RSI (Rick Stanley, Inc.)
(917) 822-7771
www.rsiny.com
Computer Systems Consulting
Linux & Open Source Specialists
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--- Begin Message ---
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Subject: |
Re: bug#8782: date command |
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Date: |
Thu, 02 Jun 2011 00:12:52 +0100 |
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User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100227 Thunderbird/3.0.3 |
On 01/06/11 18:11, Rick Stanley wrote:
> The date command is very useful. A lot of features and options which I
> take advantage of as I need them. Every once in a while I need to use
> the command to convert a UNIX Epoch Date to a normal date, so I attempt
> to use the command as:
>
> date -d 1306947372
>
> Which results in the error message, "date: invalid date `1306947372'".
>
> Neither 'date --help' or 'man date' shows that the command should have
> been written as:
>
> date -d @1306947372
>
> I needed to do a Google search to see what I was doing wrong. (My memory
> is not as good as it used to be!) ;^)
>
> I don't know why this ('@') is needed, since the date command recognizes
> many different date formats without specifying the format. For
> completeness of the help and man page, please add a line explaining that
> when passing a UNIX Epoch Date to the -d option, you need to prefix the
> date with a '@'.
>
> Thank you for your time and consideration!
You need the '@' to disambiguate. Consider fir example:
date --date=1243
date address@hidden
Unfortunately the date input formats are many and varied,
and I don't think it's worth getting specific in the man page.
The man page currently says:
"The date string format is more complex than is easily documented
here but is fully described in the info documentation."
So I'll close this as adequately documented.
thanks,
Pádraig.
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