bb date

[Chey]

By "portability" setting the date I mean using the same command and
date format to set the date wether it be using BB's date command or
the using the date command packaged with coreutils. For example, the
following two commands work with busybox's date command but do not
work on my Debian system which has a default coreutils package
installed.

devbox:/# date -s `date +%m%d%H%M%Y.%S`
date: invalid date `090719502006.56'
devbox:/# date -s `date +%Y.%m.%d-%H:%M:%S`
date: invalid date `2006.09.07-19:51:14'

It seems that the only two formats that the BB date command supports
are the two formats above which do not work with Debian and probably
don't work with other systems. The second format above seems to be
custom to BB.

To sum things up, I'm looking for the BB date command to accept more
(at least one) standard date format when setting the date.

If BB supports another format and I missed this in the code please let me know.

Thanks,
Chey


On 9/7/06, Rich Felker <dalias at aerifal.cx> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 02:50:10PM -0400, Chey wrote:
> > BB's date command seems to only accept two formats for setting the
> > date. Are these to formats subject to bb's date command only or should
> > those two formats work on other distros as well?
> >
> > I'm asking because I cannot set the date with bb's date command and
> > use that same command to set the date on my Debian box.
> >
> > I'm having trouble creating a portable script to set the date because of this.
>
> There's no such thing as "portably setting the date" since POSIX does
> not specify that the date can be changed at all. :) However in terms
> of working on most/all legacy implementations and BB, I believe one of
> the formats works well. Look at the comments in the source; I seem to
> remember them being helpful.
>
> Rich
>
> _______________________________________________
> busybox mailing list
> busybox at busybox.net
> http://busybox.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/busybox
>