{"id":565,"date":"2015-07-21T10:44:48","date_gmt":"2015-07-21T14:44:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/?p=565"},"modified":"2015-07-21T10:55:03","modified_gmt":"2015-07-21T14:55:03","slug":"shell-nuggets-musing-on-dates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/2015\/07\/21\/shell-nuggets-musing-on-dates\/","title":{"rendered":"Shell Nuggets: Musing on Dates"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nigh ever day I happen across some gem tucked away in the opaque vista of the *nix command-line shell. \u00a0 While attempting to contrive the proper arguments for a date<\/em> command interpolation, the following editorial injection\u00a0from its\u00a0GNU\u00a0info<\/em> entry\u00a0caught my fancy.<\/p>\n

28 Date input formats<\/span><\/strong>\r\n*********************<\/span><\/strong><\/pre>\n
First, a quote:<\/span><\/strong><\/pre>\n
Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months,<\/span><\/strong>\r\nare so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make<\/span><\/strong>\r\ncoherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had<\/span><\/strong>\r\nsome tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to<\/span><\/strong>\r\nmake it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden<\/span><\/strong>\r\nroutines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done<\/span><\/strong>\r\nbetter than handing down our present system. It is like a set of<\/span><\/strong>\r\ntrapezoidal building blocks, with no vertical or horizontal<\/span><\/strong>\r\nsurfaces, like a language in which the simplest thought demands<\/span><\/strong>\r\nornate constructions, useless particles and lengthy<\/span><\/strong>\r\ncircumlocutions. Unlike the more successful patterns of language<\/span><\/strong>\r\nand science, which enable us to face experience boldly or at least<\/span><\/strong>\r\nlevel-headedly, our system of temporal calculation silently and<\/span><\/strong>\r\npersistently encourages our terror of time.<\/span><\/strong><\/pre>\n
... It is as though architects had to measure length in feet,<\/span><\/strong>\r\nwidth in meters and height in ells; as though basic instruction<\/span><\/strong>\r\nmanuals demanded a knowledge of five different languages. It is<\/span><\/strong>\r\nno wonder then that we often look into our own immediate past or<\/span><\/strong>\r\nfuture, last Tuesday or a week from Sunday, with feelings of<\/span><\/strong>\r\nhelpless confusion. ...<\/span><\/strong><\/pre>\n
-- Robert Grudin, `Time and the Art of Living'.<\/span><\/strong><\/pre>\n
This section describes the textual date representations that GNU<\/span><\/strong>\r\nprograms accept. These are the strings you, as a user, can supply as<\/span><\/strong>\r\narguments to the various programs. The C interface (via the `get_date'<\/span><\/strong>\r\nfunction) is not described here.<\/span><\/strong><\/pre>\n
<\/pre>\n
Now back to work.<\/span><\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nigh ever day I happen across some gem tucked away in the opaque vista of the *nix command-line shell. \u00a0 While attempting to contrive the proper arguments for a date command interpolation, the following editorial injection\u00a0from its\u00a0GNU\u00a0info entry\u00a0caught my fancy. 28 Date input formats ********************* First, a quote: Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,51],"tags":[29,16,68,26,53],"class_list":["post-565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hacking","category-whimsy","tag-bash","tag-emacs","tag-hacking","tag-linux","tag-whimsy-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":573,"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565\/revisions\/573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}