In need of a bit of shellish magic

[Greg Rundlett]

On 6/2/06, James R. Van Zandt <jrvz at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>
> "Michael ODonnell" <michael.odonnell at comcast.net> wrote:
> >   >  The "-I" switch is short for ISO-8601, which apparently specifies
> >   >dates as "all numeric, most significant component first".  Which is
> >   >handy, because then the files sort properly in directory listings.
> >
> >   Yup, I have a lot of scripty stuff that depends on exactly such
> >   sortability - very handy.  I'd not heard of that -I switch before
> >   and it seemed promising, but it turns out that the dashes in the
> >   resultant strings render them useless for most of my purposes.
> >   And I wonder why that switch isn't mentioned (at least on my
> >   Debian unstable machines) in the man pages or in the output to
> >   the --help switch?  It's apparently a secret...  ;->
>
> I submitted the patches to get the -I switch into date in the first
> place - including man page and help text updates.  But now they're
> gone - not even in the info pages.  The -I switch is still in the
> source code, but marked "deprecated".
>
> This is (was) Debian Bug#354799, discussed here:
>
> http://groups.google.com/group/linux.debian.bugs.dist/browse_thread/thread/248e13e6ee940d3d/16f1d0c8dd1e0e4f?lnk=st&q=date+gnu+%22iso+8601%22+%22-i%22+deprecated&rnum=1#16f1d0c8dd1e0e4f
>
> Apparently there was some difficulty parsing ISO 8601 dates, so they
> decided to switch to RFC 3339 instead.  Even though all the problems
> seems to relate to the time part rather than the date.
>
> I guess we are expected to use "date --rfc-3339=date"
> now.  Or, I suppose, "date +%F".  Disappointing.
>
>              - Jim Van Zandt
>
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>

I hadn't heard of or used the -I option before and found it to be more
memorable than the traditional format identifiers (-I (for ISO) is easier to
remember than even +%F -- at least for me);  Now in the same instant that I
learn about it, I learn that it's deprecated :-(

fwiw, It *is* documented on my system  (Kubuntu) whether I use date --help
or man date.  Even though I keep my system updated constantly, I have the
5.2.1 version of coreutils
date (coreutils) 5.2.1                                 September 2005
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