bug#52525: wanted to add option to date command to handle pure numeric input in varying ways and output for invalid dates
On Wed, Dec 15, 2021 at 02:09:29PM -0800, Paul Eggert wrote: > On 12/15/21 12:39, Mike Marchywka wrote: > > $echo 2000 | date +%Y -f- > > 2021 > > How about this instead? The idea is to avoid > adding features if they can easily be > implemented with some other standard utility. > This way, you can write your shell scripts now > rather than waiting for a future fix (plus, it > keeps 'date' simpler). > > echo 2000 | sed 's/$/-07-01/' | date +%Y -f- > That is great until the input format is -MM-DD :) The point of using date was to get all the internal stuff that deals with ambiguous formats and probably a lot of other people do that too. The info documentation does point out how ambiguous the human readable dates are. I guess 2000 could also be ms since epoch. I am calling date from c++ and could just ias easily wrap it in another c++ program to deal with this but thought it was of more general interest and I did not want to make another kluge. Generally I agree with your approach but if date is going to be a swiss army knife for date conversions it makes some sense to allow user selection of ambiguity resolution doesn't it? Thanks. -- mike marchywka 306 charles cox canton GA 30115 USA, Earth marchy...@hotmail.com 404-788-1216 ORCID: -0001-9237-455X
bug#52525: wanted to add option to date command to handle pure numeric input in varying ways and output for invalid dates
On 12/15/21 14:24, Mike Marchywka wrote: if date is going to be a swiss army knife for date conversions it makes some sense to allow user selection of ambiguity resolution doesn't it? There are thousands of possible data conversions and I'm not sure we want to head down the road of trying to handle them all. That being said, this particular conversion might be worth the trouble. However, 'date' uses the same date parser that a lot of other GNU programs do. Surely if there's a change to be made to date parsing it should be made there, not just to 'date', so that all the other programs can use the new functionality.
bug#52525: wanted to add option to date command to handle pure numeric input in varying ways and output for invalid dates
On 12/15/21 12:39, Mike Marchywka wrote: $echo 2000 | date +%Y -f- 2021 How about this instead? The idea is to avoid adding features if they can easily be implemented with some other standard utility. This way, you can write your shell scripts now rather than waiting for a future fix (plus, it keeps 'date' simpler). echo 2000 | sed 's/$/-07-01/' | date +%Y -f-
bug#52525: wanted to add option to date command to handle pure numeric input in varying ways and output for invalid dates
I'm trying to implement the options shown below. I downloaded the coreutils source for my distro and don't expect a problem compling and implementing it. However, is there any interest in adding similar functions to the main code? I would imagine something like, date --option=four-digits-are-,invalid-output-blank-line My immediate concern is getting this to take the input as a year rather than HHMM and it would be easier to make date more versatile than put logic around it, $echo 2000 | date +%Y -f- 2021 not sure if anyone else would want that. Thanks. Mike Marchywka 306 Charles Cox Drive Canton, GA 30115 470-758-0799 404-788-1216 From: Mike Marchywka Sent: Wednesday, December 15, 2021 2:08 PM To: coordina...@translationproject.org Subject: the ubuntu "date" command info pointed me to you, question on modification I wanted to add an option to the linux date command to deal with pure number date stings - allowing for a 4 digit number to be a year instead of HHMM - which should be easy for me to do but I wanted to see how it integrates. Also, I wanted an output option, that I could write, to send an invalid message to stdout instead of stderr. How should I proceed? Thanks. Mike Marchywka 306 Charles Cox Drive Canton, GA 30115 470-758-0799 404-788-1216
