stream manipulation with time

[Sebastiaan <sebas@sacred-key.org>]

Hi,

I have two computers and I want to set the time on computer 1 the time of
computer 2 minus 1 (I need this because I run root over nfs, and I do
not like 'modification in future' warnings). I played along with some
commands and it seems that something almost works (and when it works,
'date' will be replaced by a 'rdate' syntax):

date | cut -c12-14		prints the hours
expr `date | cut -c15-16` - 1	takes the minutes minus 1 and prints it too
date | cut -c17-19		prints the seconds

What would be nice if these three could be put on one line, like:

date --set `date | cut -c12-14``expr `date | cut -c15-16` - 1``date | cut -c17-19`
				^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The problem is the nested `` here:

Is there someway to bypass this, or a better method to do this so I only
have to call 'date' once?

Of course I could write a script, echo the three expressions to a file and
do a: date --set `cat /tmp/time` 
but I like more elegant methods.

Thanks in advance, 
Sebastiaan