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Re: script with date operation??



On Sat, May 13, 2006 at 02:18:10PM -0400, Michael Marsh wrote:
> Since you're doing this in a script, it presumably doesn't need to be
> done in a single line.  I'd start with
> date -d "Feb 2, 2006" +"%s"
> to get the number of seconds since the epoch for midnight on the date
> specified.  Then I'd do
> date +"%s"
> to get the same for the current time.  Subtract those, and you get the
> number of seconds since Feb 2, 2006.  There are 86400 seconds in a
> day.  Divide, throw out the remainder, and you've got the number of
> days since Feb 2, 2006.

That sort of work is precisely why I do it in Perl. Because
then you start getting into messiness with leap years,
timezones, etc., etc., etc. There's a reason that time
libraries are hard to write. :-) Perl's done all the work
for you; be lazy.

-- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve@laniels.org
Cell: +(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key

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