--- Begin Message ---
|
Subject: |
Alphabetic Character Following date -d |
|
Date: |
Sat, 28 Jan 2017 06:15:58 +0000 (UTC) |
Testing a script to see how it handled invalid data, I had it execute the
command:
date -d "x023-04-05 01:00"
Somewhat surprisingly, this was not treated as an error. The response was:
Tue Apr 4 06:07:02 LMT 0023
This happened on a Ubuntu system using coreutils-8.25.
However, I was not able to duplicate it on a Cygwin system using coreutils 8.26,
Where the date was flagged as invalid.
So, at a guess, this was a bug that was fixed in 8.26.
But, not so fast - the following commands give identical surprising results
with both versions
(for convenience, I set my time zone to UTC before issuing these commands):
date -d a
Sat, Jan 28, 2017 1:00:00 AM
I searched the man and info pages in vain for how the command might be
interpreting "a" here.
If there is some place where this is documented and I just missed it, please
let me know.
In the meantime, I'll continue.
I tried other letters - "b" through "i" each advanced the displayed time by 1
hour (so "i" was 9:00).
Upper- and lower-case were treated the same.
At "j", I had a surprise:
date -d j
date: invalid date ‘j’
But then I was equally surprised by "k":
date -d k
Sat, Jan 28, 2017 10:00:00 AM
It seems to have picked up where the sequence was broken.
Continuing, "l" advanced to 11:00, and "m" to 12:00 (PM - presumably noon).
Another surprise came with "n":
date -d n
Fri, Jan 27, 2017 11:00:00 PM
>From that point, the result marches backwards by an hour each time until "x"
>reaches 1:00 p.m.
Then "y" matches the output for "m". And "z":
date -d z
Sat, Jan 28, 2017 12:00:00 AM
And, having run out of letters, my test was complete.
Is the date command behaving as it should for all these examples?
--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message ---
|
Subject: |
Re: bug#25560: Alphabetic Character Following date -d |
|
Date: |
Sat, 28 Jan 2017 02:35:59 -0800 |
|
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/45.5.1 |
Owen Leibman wrote:
Is the date command behaving as it should for all these examples?
Those letters are military time zone abbreviations, so yes.
--- End Message ---