dateutils: Making everything better

I want to look over the standard date utility out of coreutils soon, but that will be a rather complex adventure, a la dmesg or top.

For now, I have dateutils to show, which is going to make some people in the audience very very happy indeed.

dateutils isn’t one tool, it’s about a half-dozen, each set up to manage dates and conversions quickly and seamlessly.

dateutils comes with tools that can easily find the difference between two times, add or subtract set amounts of time to dates, skim through lists to pick out specific dates, navigate backwards or forwards to a set date given a starting time, convert between calendars, generate sequences of dates or times and skip particular ones, compare dates in the shell, and a lot of other things.

dateutils alone is something you’ll probably want if you work with files or timestamped data at all; I’ve already put it to good use helping organize personal photos that I know were taken with the wrong date set on the camera.

That’s just the first example I could think of. If you have the slightest interest, you owe it to yourself to check this one out. It could conceivably save you immense time and effort.

A gold smilie for dateutils: 😀