dateh

A GNU date wrapper that adds several format specifiers that may prove useful to some folks.

The first set deals with relative date outputs (English only):

Spec	Description
@{d}	relative date, abbrev date names (e.g. yesterday, next Fri, 17 days ago)
@{D}	like @{d}, only with full date names (e.g. next Friday, 17 days' time)
@{d+}	like @{d}, but falls back to user-configurable date representation if outside 1 week's range (default: %Y-%m-%d)
@{w}	relative week (e.g. last week, 3 weeks' time)
@{m}	relative month (e.g. last month, 3 months' time)
@{y}	relative year (e.g. last year, 3 years' time)
@{h}	auto-select relative representation (abbreviated day name)
@{H}	auto-select relative representation (full day name)

NOTE: @{d} and @{D} outputs follow GNU date conventions for relative date input:

• last XYZ for dates up to 7 days ago
• next XYZ for dates up to 7 days in the future

The second set deals with ordinal day-of-month representations:

Spec	Description
@{o}	ordinal day-of-month, short-form (e.g. 29th)
@{O}	ordinal day-of-month, long-form (e.g. twenty-ninth)

Dependencies

GNU date must be in your PATH.

Installation

Copy dateh to a directory in your PATH.

Usage

dateh takes the same options and format specifiers as GNU date, in addition to:

• -h|--help to print dateh-specific help
• -H|--longhelp to print both dateh and date help
• -V|--version to print dateh version

If the DATEH_DEFAULT_FORMAT environment variable is set, dateh uses its value as the fallback date representation for the @{d+} specifier (default: %Y-%m-%d).

Examples

$ dateh
Sun Jan 27 20:05:00 +08 2019

$ dateh -d "now" "+@{D} %X"
today 20:05:00

$ dateh -d "now + 3 weeks" "+the @{O} of %B, %Y"
the seventeenth of February, 2019

$ DATEH_DEFAULT_FORMAT=%m/%d/%Y dateh -d "last month" \
     "+@{d+}, @{w}, @{m}, @{y} %H:%M %P"
12/27/2018, 4 weeks ago, last month, last year 20:05 pm