Tha date command, one of the eldest tools in Unix has got one quirk that escaped me all those years. As usual with these things, it was a delegate who pointed this out to me, with a wry smile.
A bit of background first. If you need to extract hour and minutes from the date command, you'd probably use:
$ date +%H:%M
14:48
The little 'inverted polish logic' (is that why they keep telling me these things? ;-) ) is if you try to use the AM/PM indicator, achieved with the 'p' options.
Try the following:
$ date +%H:%M\ %p
14:49 PM
Then try:
$ date +%H:%M\ %P
14:49 pm
Don't know the background to this, but it does appear a deliberate tease ;-)
G-AVLN in front of her home
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2 comments:
The reason is as follows: the %p format comes from the SUS/POSIX, and uses the format specified in the locale (not necessarily upper case). GNU wanted to added another option for lower case, and they choose %P. %P does not exist in standard (non-GNU) versions of date. See also the man pages for strftime(3).
Ahh - that explains. Except that both HP and Solaris (just checked their man pages) use the GNU version...
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