On Nov 15, 12:24pm, smb@cs.columbia.edu ("Steven M. Bellovin") wrote:
-- Subject: Re: date feature request

| 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...

The reason I added it is because it makes date math in scripts easy, like:

    date -d 'yesterday' +%Y%m%d
or
    date -d 'last friday' +%Y%m%d

I used to install gnu date to be able to do that, but now it is not needed
anymore :-)

christos