bug#6453: coreutils: date -- Add new options for ISO 8601 date formats (-O)

[Jari Aalto]

Package: coreutils
Version: 8.5
Severity: wishlist


I'd like to suggest adding options to cover the typical ISO 8601 dates.
The options "O" seems to be free in date(1) manual page. Suggestions:

    -O      YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM        (possibly most of then used)
    -O::S   YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS
    -O::T   YYYY-MM-DD"T"HH:MM:SS   (The canonical form)

The output can be produced using current option set:

    %Y-%m-%d    1999-12-31
    %Y-%j       1999-365
    %G-W%V-%u   1999-W52-5
    %H:%M:%S    23:59:59

but it would be nice to have a standrd "-O" option set specifically
designed from ISO dates.

Jari

References:

    Standard - Date - ISO 9601 (Markus Kuhn)
    http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html

    Standard - Date - ISO 8601 (Wikipedia)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601