{"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 on up to months, are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had some...<\/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}]}}