On 08/05/2026 05:55, Collin Funk wrote:
Pádraig Brady <[email protected]> writes:
And be sure to include the one liner script so people can do it
themselves. And be sure it's a real one liner.
A portable one liner could be:
printf $(printf '\\%03o\\n' $(seq 97 122) $(seq 65 90)) | xargs -If date +"%%f
%f"
Though that's a bit obtuse.
Note we had something similar with `dircolors --print-ls-colors`
where we previously had a one liner to display the database.
I'm considering instead we should support date --show-formats
which would generate the above table with the current date/time/locale.
It could also show the %E and %O variants (if different).
It might also show the --iso and --rfc formats too.
My concern with a one liner or table of examples is that it risks being
misleading for, in my opinion, very little benefit.
An easy example is %H and %I which look the same for half of
day:
$ for spec in H I; do date -d 12:00 +%$spec; done
12
12
$ for spec in H I; do date -d 13:00 +%$spec; done
13
01
The --help output and info page explanations are fairly short and
adequate enough that one is unlikely to pick the incorrect specifier.
OOK I'll leave `date --show-all-formats` for now.
I've pushed the change to show descriptive examples in --help.
Marking this as done.
cheers,
Padraig
