Re: Enhacement request - 'date' util

[Alejandro Redondo]

Matthew Woehlke escribió:
> Please use newlines and don't use HTML entities in text mail (or don't 
> send HTML, if that was the problem).
>
> Your original mail looked like this:
> > Good morning from Spain,first of all, thanks for your effort and for 
> > this rich
> > featured tools... awesome work!Secondly, to the "date" command
> > developers, it would be possible to develop the "-a" 
> > feature, like
>
> It is extremely difficult to read this block of text that has no 
> newlines except where line wrapping occurred, is missing spaces 
> between paragraphs, and is strewn with HTML entities.
>
> I have reformatted the relevant parts so that it is legible.
>
> Alejandro Redondo wrote:
> > Secondly, to the "date" command developers, it would be possible to
> > develop the "-a" feature, like other UNIXes distros do?
> >
> > Man from solaris 10:
> > -a [-]sss.fff   Slowly adjust the time by sss.fff seconds (fff
> > represents fractions of a second). This adjustment can be positive or
> > negative.  The system's clock is sped up or slowed down until it has
> > drifted by the number of seconds specified.
> >
> > Man from hpux 11.23:
> > [snipped; same as above]
> >
> > Really useful feature to avoid crashes and dumps in apps like SAP or
> > Oracle when changing time is needed.
>
> While that does indeed sound like an interesting option, and there is 
> precedent of other OS's having it, I am curious why you don't just use 
> ntpd?
Hi again,
sorry about those HTML characters... I sent the first email from a 
webmail client.
And sorry about my bad English too, it's not my natal language.

Well, the first clock set, when ntpd starts, is made in just one step.
This can be a problem when the client host is several seconds different 
than the ntp server.

In the example I suffered, I had to sync different flavors clients with 
the ntpd servers.
Unluckily some of them had the ntpd daemon stopped for a lot of time and 
they had differences, to have an example, about 100secs (ntpdate -d 
<ntp_serve> used to know it).
It was not a problem on solaris/hpux boxes to use the "date -a 100.00" 
and then restart the ntpd daemon with the right config avoiding a 
100secs jump in time.
This was not the same for the Linux ones as I did not find a solution to 
slowly (but without notorious jumps) adjust the system clock and then 
restart the ntpd.

Best regards,