Linux Section

Tomorrows's date

At How can I find tomorrow's or yesterday's date in a script?, some anonymous person left what I consider to be a stupid comment.

Now before anyone gets their politically correct hackles all aroused, I am not implying that the person who left the comment is bereft of intelligence, is incapable of intelligent comments, is unworthy of human association and so on. We all say stupid things now and then: we are momentarily distracted and unthinking, we're in a hurry, whatever. If there exists a person who has never once said or done something stupid, I don't want to know them: I wouldn't like them at all.

In this case, the answer (one answer) was right on on the page itself: for a SCO system lacking GNU date, he could download the "datemath" package and simply do "datecalc +1". If he were running Linux, "date --date=tomorrow" is a simple way to do it. On Mac OS X, you could do:

x=`date +%s`
date -r `expr $x + 86400`
# or
date -v+1d
 

Or, as the original page suggested, you could use Perl. You could find all that and more scattered across this site in various places if you bothered to look.

With a very little effort, almost anyone should be able to figure that out themselves: "man date" is a good start. It might take a little more effort to get to the "date +%s" solution": you might need "man strftime" also. But it is all there.

Ahh, but why isn't it all just in one place? Some folks are in a hurry, as we noted, and don't have time to research and think: they just want the magic incantation. that will solve their problem. We can do that, but it costs money. Otherwise, you have to turn the brain on for a few minutes and pay attention.

3 comments

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Wed Mar 22 12:23:01 2006:   anonymous


tomorrow:
date --date="tomorrow"
date --date="1 day"
yesterday:
date --date="yesterday"
date --date="1 day ago"
in X days:
date --date="X days"
X days ago:
date --date="X days ago"
date --date="-X days"
all also works with seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, months, years and maybe more...



Wed Mar 22 12:40:25 2006:   TonyLawrence


Yes: I gave that example in the article.



Mon Oct 20 02:38:17 2008:   anonymous


Well, it is half past midnight, October 20 here in Brasil DST started here yesterday and date +%Y%m%d -d "yesterday" is telling me that yesterday was October 18. Maybe after 01h00 date will straighten out itself, hopefully.



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