On Tue, 14 Nov 2006 09:54:47 -0500, "George Georgalis" <george@galis.org>
wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 12:12:23AM -0600, John Darrow wrote:
> >On 13 Nov 2006 22:40:18 -0600, George Georgalis <george@galis.org> wrote:
> >>would the invocation 
> >>
> >>date -R [[[[[cc]yy]mm]dd]hh]mm[.ss] [+format]
> >>
> >>be a reasonable feature request to date(1)? is there
> >>another way to get date [+format] from an arbitrary
> >>canonical time?
> >
> >On unix systems, the "canonical" time format (time_t) is actually
> >seconds from the epoch.  The input format shown above is just provided
> >by date(1) to make it easier for those silly people who actually want
> >to manually fiddle with their clocks.  ;-)
> 
> my first draft of the note used "human enterable"
> then I looked at the date man to see that the term
> canonical was used for that. yes it seems odd that
> someone would set their clock with anything but ntp.

See /usr/src/gnu/dist/xcvs/lib/getdate.y -- code that I wrote in 1979,
though seriously rewritten since then.


		--Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb