/ David Champion wrote on Fri 9.Nov'12 at 15:00:44 -0600 /
> * On 09 Nov 2012, Jeremy Kitchen wrote:
> > On Fri, Nov 09, 2012 at 11:12:34AM +0000, Jamie Paul Griffin wrote:
> > > Hi
> > >
> > > I would like to use the method of setting messages to expire described
> > > on Gary's page[1] but the problem is that this script uses gnu date(1)
> > > and I have BSD date(1).
> >
> > there's no compatible option with bsd `date`?
> >
> > You could also replace the call to `date` with a $SCRIPTING_LANGUAGE
> > script (perl would probably work pretty well for this, and I believe
> > perl is pretty standard on the BSDs) which does the same thing. All it's
> > doing with GNU `date` is spitting out an RFC822 formatted `date`, which
> > I would think BSD `date` is capable of doing, but a simple perl script
> > would definitely be able to.
>
> The greater problem in Gary's script for Jamie is not printing an RFC822
> date (there is no one-shot option, but the formatters are all there),
> but parsing date/time from natural language, which GNU date's '-d' does.
>
> Python option:
> $ easy_install parsedatetime
> $ python
> >>> from parsedatetime.parsedatetime import Calendar
> >>> import time
> >>> rfc822format = '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S -0000'
> >>> c = Calendar()
> >>> st, flag = c.parse('next Monday at 2pm')
> >>> t = time.mktime(st)
> >>> tm = time.gmtime(t)
> >>> time.strftime(rfc822format, tm)
> 'Mon, 12 Nov 2012 20:00:00 -0000'
>
> parsedatetime doesn't know anything about timezones, so the mktime and
> gmtime are just to adapt the struct_time value from c.parse() from local
> time to GMT, so that the RFC822 address can assume it. This lets the
> script work for anyone, without needing to calculate a zone offset for
> your locale.
That's great David, thank you. I had thought about python but i'm still very
much in the learning process with it so hadn't got that far. That looks pretty
simple, that will give me something to do today. Much appreciation to you both.
Jamie.
