On Wed, 15 Nov 2006 16:55:58 +0000 (UTC), christos@astron.com (Christos
Zoulas) wrote:

> 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!
> 
The main reason I wrote it is that back then, most computers didn't have
TOD clocks, and I wanted to make it easy for people to set the time when
rebooting...

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