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coreutils: Date input formats

 
 29 Date input formats
 *********************
 
 First, a quote:
 
      Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months,
      are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make
      coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible.  Indeed, had
      some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to make
      it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden
      routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done better
      than handing down our present system.  It is like a set of
      trapezoidal building blocks, with no vertical or horizontal
      surfaces, like a language in which the simplest thought demands
      ornate constructions, useless particles and lengthy
      circumlocutions.  Unlike the more successful patterns of language
      and science, which enable us to face experience boldly or at least
      level-headedly, our system of temporal calculation silently and
      persistently encourages our terror of time.
 
      ... It is as though architects had to measure length in feet, width
      in meters and height in ells; as though basic instruction manuals
      demanded a knowledge of five different languages.  It is no wonder
      then that we often look into our own immediate past or future, last
      Tuesday or a week from Sunday, with feelings of helpless confusion.
      ...
 
      —Robert Grudin, ‘Time and the Art of Living’.
 
    This section describes the textual date representations that GNU
 programs accept.  These are the strings you, as a user, can supply as
 arguments to the various programs.  The C interface (via the
 ‘parse_datetime’ function) is not described here.
 

Menu

 
· General date syntax            Common rules.
· Calendar date items            19 Dec 1994.
· Time of day items              9:20pm.
· Time zone items                EST, PDT, UTC, ...
· Combined date and time of day items 1972-09-24T20:02:00,000000-0500.
· Day of week items              Monday and others.
· Relative items in date strings next tuesday, 2 years ago.
· Pure numbers in date strings   19931219, 1440.
· Seconds since the Epoch        @1078100502.
· Specifying time zone rules     TZ="America/New_York", TZ="UTC0".
· Authors of parse_datetime      Bellovin, Eggert, Salz, Berets, et al.
 

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