Debian Bug report logs - #729952
/bin/date: date parsing inconsistencies

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Message #5 received at [email protected] (full text, mbox, reply):

From: "Ph. Marek" <[email protected]>

To: Debian Bug Tracking System <[email protected]>

Subject: /bin/date: date parsing inconsistencies

Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 11:18:23 +0100

Package: coreutils
Version: 8.21-1
Severity: minor
File: /bin/date

These work as expected:

$ date -d '1 hour'
Die Nov 19 11:21:35 CET 2013
$ date -d '0 hour'
Die Nov 19 10:21:37 CET 2013
$ date -d '1 hour ago'
Die Nov 19 09:21:40 CET 2013


This gives a wrong answer, and no parsing error:
$ date -d 'a hour ago'
Die Nov 19 11:21:44 CET 2013

It looks like single characters are parsed as hour offsets:
$ date -d 'a'
Die Nov 19 02:00:00 CET 2013
$ date -d 'b'
Die Nov 19 03:00:00 CET 2013
$ date -d 'c'
$ date -d 'h'
Die Nov 19 09:00:00 CET 2013
$ date -d 'o'
Mon Nov 18 23:00:00 CET 2013
$ date -d 'p'
Mon Nov 18 22:00:00 CET 2013

I couldn't find anything about that in the info documentation.


This would be a bit more correct, but gives an error:
$ date -d 'an hour ago'
date: invalid date 'an hour ago'


$ echo $TZ
Europe/Vienna
$ locale
LANG=de_AT.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=de_AT:de
LC_CTYPE="de_AT.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="de_AT.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="de_AT.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="de_AT.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="de_AT.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="de_AT.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="de_AT.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="de_AT.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="de_AT.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="de_AT.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_AT.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_AT.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=



-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.11-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=de_AT.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_AT.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages coreutils depends on:
ii  libacl1      2.2.52-1
ii  libattr1     1:2.4.47-1
ii  libc6        2.17-93
ii  libselinux1  2.1.13-3

coreutils recommends no packages.

coreutils suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information

Message #10 received at [email protected] (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Michael Stone <[email protected]>

To: "Ph. Marek" <[email protected]>, [email protected]

Subject: Re: Bug#729952: /bin/date: date parsing inconsistencies

Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2013 14:16:05 -0500

The date parsing feature exists in Debian only for compatibility with 
upstream. It is a complete misfeature, and I would prefer that it didn't 
exist at all. In an ideal world the entire idea of trying to utilize a
natural language parser would be scrapped in favor of a simple and 
regular grammar. Unfortunately, it is what it is. The only way to use 
the feature is to experiment until you find something that does what you 
want. The corollary to that is that nothing can be changed, because 
doing so would break existing scripts that were tweaked to perform 
correctly using the current implementation.

Mike Stone

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