On Wed, Jun 12, 2002 at 08:28:17PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote: > > > Andrew Ferrier wrote: > > > > It would be good if there were a feature to append the current > > > > date to the end of an archived mailbox, to make them easier to > > > > tell apart in a directory. > > > > > > Have you looked at the -s option? -s "_%m-%d-%Y" > > > > Indeed, and I use almost what you've suggested there. But I > > just think it's so common I think it would be worth a separate > > option. But's it's just an opinion --- if you think it's not > > worth it, don't worry.
It is not obvious how to do that. And if there existed such an option, the result should be fairly obvious. But different languages correspond to different ways to express the date. Such a default extension to the archive name would have to respect the user's locale. Now, in a german locale, the current date is '10.07.2011'. Using dots in a pathname doesn't look very natural to me. In an US-english locale, it is '07/10/2011', and in a british english locale, it is '10/07/11', both of which cannot be used in a Unix pathname at all. Ok, we could convert these separators to dashes, but is that a really natural thing to do? We could use a date formatted according to ISO 8601. But that's a very technical standard, and neither obvious nor natural at all. And, finally, I think that the complete date including the day of month may be too fine-grained. It is not suitable if you use the same destination archive file more than once, on more than one single day, at least. I'm open for suggestions, but currently I tend to reject this suggestion and close the bug. Nikolaus -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
