Re: XML-like date/time support ?

[Philip Rowlands]

On Sun, 8 Jan 2006, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

> The XML folks have defined a single common international date/time
> format people can actually use :
> http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime

The W3 consortium has received a proposal, from Reuters, for a subset of 
ISO 8601, which has been marked "This document is a NOTE made available 
by the W3 Consortium for discussion only. This indicates no endorsement 
of its content..."

> Unfortunately it can not be produced by shell scripts using the "date" 
> command.

The full format used in the note, save the fractional part of a second, 
can be specified as:

$ date '+%Y-%m-%dT%H-%M-%S%:z'
2006-01-08T19-29-44+00:00

(Note to maintainers - %Z does not appear separately in the 5.93 
manpage. I don't know enough texinfo or troff to suggest a fix, sorry.)

> Would it be possible to enhance date and :
> - add a formatting flag to output the timezone in value (%z ?)
> - add a formatting shorthand for full date/time in w3c format ?

I suspect you are using an older version of "date" which lacks the 
timezone specifiers %z, %:z, %Z etc.


Cheers,
Phil