(Relative items in date strings): Warn about fuzz in relative units.

This commit is contained in:
Jim Meyering
2003-07-31 20:33:45 +00:00
parent 689ba6d996
commit fed2d190f0
+20
View File
@@ -370,6 +370,26 @@ When a relative item causes the resulting date to cross a boundary
where the clocks were adjusted, typically for daylight-saving time,
the resulting date and time are adjusted accordingly.
The fuzz in units can cause problems with relative items. For
example, @samp{2003-07-31 -1 month} might evaluate to 2003-07-01,
because 2003-06-31 is an invalid date. To determine the previous
month more reliably, you can ask for the month before the 15th of the
current month. For example:
@example
$ date -R
Thu, 31 Jul 2003 13:02:39 -0700
$ date --date="-1 month" +'Last month was %B?'
Last month was July?
$ date --date="$(date +%Y-%m-15) -1 month" +'Last month was %B!'
Last month was June!
@end example
Also, take care when manipulating dates around clock changes such as
daylight saving leaps. In a few cases these have added or subtracted
as much as 24 hours from the clock, so it is often wise to adopt
universal time by setting the @env{TZ} environment variable to
@samp{UTC0} before embarking on calendrical calculations.
@node Pure numbers in date strings
@section Pure numbers in date strings