severity 514914 wishlist
tags 514914 wontfix
On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 09:57:51PM +0100, Eduard Bloch wrote:
See subject, setting the date is a popular source
of confusion for non-US citizens. This problem is especially PITA
because the string expected for -s is not documented well in the
manpage. Just assuming that it's the same format as the one from date's
output ends up in the missery shown in the log below. And when I try to
use the popular middle-european format, it fails too, see #211508 for
details.
date's parser has all sort of issues, and there is no "expected string"
as it tries to be a natural language parser. My main inclination would
be to drop the natural language parsing entirely, as it has never really
worked. Unfortunately, debian's date would then be incompatible with
everyone else's. I don't see a realistic solution. Maybe you can
convince upstream to drop natural language parsing and replace it with
some structured format. I doubt that will go far upstream, either,
because of compatibility issues. Maybe an entirely new option with a
rational syntax? All it needs is someone to write it...
FYI, ISO 8601 format mostly works (except that you can't use the T to
separate date and time):
date -d '2009-01-01 14:55'
Thu Jan 1 14:55:00 EST 2009
Note that to set the time you don't need to mess with -s at all, you
can "simply" use
date 010114552009
as described in the man page.
Mike Stone
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