Paul Eggert wrote: > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > ... or that the date/time format provided to the "-d" option in > > this particular example is an invalid time stamp? > > A bit of both. > > ... > > I can assure you that this error occurs regardless of the time > > stamp format used/provided. > > No, it works just fine with numeric time stamps, where there is no > ambiguity. For example: > > $ date -d "Tue Jan 14 08:25:26 PDT 2008" +%s > date: invalid date `Tue Jan 14 08:25:26 PDT 2008' > $ date -d "Tue Jan 14 08:25:26 -0700 2008" +%s > 1200324326 > $ echo $TZ > America/Los_Angeles
Let me state this in a slightly different way. You are trying to use GNU date's --date=STRING date parsing extension to parse the historical default date format. But the problem is that the historical default date format is not exact and has the problems mentioned by Paul and Phil. On quick glance it might seem that using 'date' output should work because it is the default, right? But it doesn't because of the ambiguous nature of it. It is the default because of legacy. That is the original US centric format before people became concerned about international use. It wasn't a problem then but it is a problem now. Better is to use the 'date -R' format which is not ambiguous. Then the GNU date --date=STRING extension won't have problems parsing it. I think if you retrain yourself to type in 'date -R' everywhere that you should have used 'date' previously it will make things simpler and unambiguous. I almost never use a plain 'date' anymore. $ date -R Thu, 17 Jan 2008 16:00:39 -0700 $ date -d "$(date -R)" +%s 1200610873 Unfortunately use of -R is not portable. POSIX defines -u however. That might work better for you in your task anyway. $ date -u Thu Jan 17 23:03:27 UTC 2008 $ date -d "$(date -u)" +%s 1200611075 Paul, can "UTC" be counted upon to be unambiguous in that location? Hope that helps, Bob _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
