Setdate

© June 2001 Tony Lawrence

The Unix/Linux "date" command will display or set the current date and time, but ordinary folks find its syntax confusing. I wrote a little script that tries to make it a little less geeky.

The "setdate" is just a more user-friendly front end to changing the date and time:

echo -n "Enter Date or leave blank for `date +%m/%d/%y`: " 
read mydat
echo -n "Enter Time or leave blank for `date +%H:%M`: " 
read mytime
if [ "$mydat" != "" ]
then
      mmdd=`echo $mydat | sed 's/\///g;s/..$//'`
      yr=`echo $mydat | sed 's/\///g;s/^....//'`
else
      mmdd=`date +%m%d`
      yr=`date +%y`
fi

if [ "$mytime" != "" ]
then
      newtime=`echo $mytime | sed 's/://g'`
else
      newtime=`date +%H%M`
fi
date "$mmdd$newtime$yr"

This script works on Linux, SCO and most other Unixes.

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