Re: Is there a POSIX compliant way of turning a "HH:MM:SS" formatted string to seconds? ...

[lbrtchx@tutamail.com]

OK, it makes some more sense now. The range of digits in the octal system is from 0 to 7, so it would complain with "08" and "09" (but not with "10" which would then be "8" in octal), but why would command line utilities assume you are encoding numeric values as octal? Now I notice many people have stumble on the same problem. There should be a straight forward way to encode from "HH:MM:SS" to seconds. I doubt that the date utility would assume you are computing numbers as octal.