topic Re: date format option in Operating System - HP-UX

date format option

blackwater — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 05:19:43 GMT

I read online documentation for the date command http://docs.hp.com/en/B2355-90689/date.1.html.
According to it there is no format option +%s. However when I run this command:
/usr/bin/date +%s
I get a correct result:
1281507492

Why do you not include this format option in your documentation?

Re: date format option

Michal Kapalka (mikap) — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 05:53:26 GMT

hi,

yes you have right, there is no this entry in the manapage, but if you look into general man page ( Unix ) you will find this :

%s seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC

mikap

Re: date format option

Matti_Kurkela — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 06:10:53 GMT

By using the "Complete book in PDF" link and check the copyright and publication information in the first pages of the book/PDF.

The document you were reading is the first edition of HP-UX 11.11 man pages, published in December 2000. It's almost 10 years old.

I'm pretty sure this functionality didn't exist in 11.11 in about 2002/2003. I guess it may have been added by some patch after that. At that time, I wrote a tiny C program to overcome the problem.

Which version of HP-UX you're using? ("uname -a" please)

If the option exists but the installed manpage for date(1) on your system doesn't know about it, then it can be said it's a documentation bug.

MK

Re: date format option

blackwater — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 06:16:30 GMT

I am using HP 11.31.

I have taken a look at "HP-UX Reference" (2007) and the manpage on the server. Seems like +%s is not documented.

Re: date format option

Raj D. — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 06:31:41 GMT

Correct, the +%s option is not there in the man page: I checked ( page 205 )of the blackwater,
command referene, it is good that you found it, HP may include it in the next KB Knowledge base document,

http://docs.hp.com/en/B2355-91017/B2355-91017.pdf ## Page 205 (11.31)

---
date(1) date(1)
NAME
date - display or set the date and time
------

Cheers ,
Raj.

Re: date format option

Dennis Handly — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 08:24:19 GMT

It appears that %s also works on 11.23.

Re: date format option

Bill Hassell — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 21:15:35 GMT

Based on some average 11.00, 11.11, 11.23 and 11.31 systems, date %s works starting with 11.23 and fails in anything prior. Yet another item that fell through the documentation gap. It was probably added as a simple change to the date command along with other enhancements and the author forgot to write up the details.

Re: date format option

James R. Ferguson — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 21:25:51 GMT

Hi:

> Bill: Based on some average 11.00, 11.11, 11.23 and 11.31 systems, date %s works starting with 11.23 and fails in anything prior.

And in that case, since all of the aforementioned releases had Perl, simply do:

# perl -le 'print time()'

Regards!

...JRF...

Re: date format option

blackwater — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 05:18:45 GMT

It is a insignificant bug in the technical documentation.

Re: date format option

Dennis Handly — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 03:52:35 GMT

This was implemented on 11.23 in strftime(3) with QXCR1000509179 for Linux compatibility.

I filed an enhancement QXCR1001066009 to document this for strftime(3) and date(1).