Re: Full Julian date in date command formatting options? (original) (raw)

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From: Eric Blake
Subject: Re: Full Julian date in date command formatting options?
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 13:36:11 -0600
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On 10/11/2013 01:18 PM, Eric Blake wrote:

On 10/11/2013 11:56 AM, Reed Underwood wrote: > I wonder if it would be alright to implement a > full Julian date in the date command's format options > (maybe a %J?). It could be really useful in shell > scripts, etc.

Can you give an example of what you mean be a full Julian date?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day suggests:

For example, The Julian Date for 00:30:00.0 January 1, 2013 is 2456293.520833.

If the astronomical term is what you want, then maybe you really do have a format that cannot be expressed in any existing notation, and maybe it really is worth burning a % notation. But how common is the Astronomical Julian Date in shell programming?

On the other hand, that wikipedia page also suggests:

Outside of an astronomical or historical context, if a given "Julian date" is "40", this most likely means the fortieth day of a given Gregorian year, namely February 9.

and that description sounds like what 'date +%j' already gives you.

-- Eric Blake eblake redhat com +1-919-301-3266 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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