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

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From: Reed Underwood
Subject: Re: Full Julian date in date command formatting options?
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 21:25:17 -0500
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15)

On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 04:44:09PM -0600, Eric Blake wrote:

On 10/11/2013 04:18 PM, Erik Auerswald wrote: > I'd say that 'date' is the natural program to try for date > manipulations. ;-) > > GNU systems are very useful in scientific settings, IMHO adding full > Julian date in the astronomical sense to 'date' further enhances this.

Hmm, the aspect of date conversion is interesting. In particular:

We already have bi-directional conversion between common and Epoch dates ('date +%s.%N' to convert to seconds since Epoch, and 'date -d @...' to convert Epoch back to common). So if we do add a conversion to Julian date output, we should also add a -d shorthand for conversion from Julian on input.

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

So it looks to me like the date strings of format '@' are parsed by posixtime. Seems adding a directive for Julian dates would require modifying that parser, which might be a bigger deal than this is worth.

-R.