In article <20061114132053.93f1a2fe.smb@cs.columbia.edu>,
Steven M. Bellovin <smb@cs.columbia.edu> wrote:
>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.

Well, thanks! Now our date(1) uses this! I wanted this feature for
a long time!

christos