Re: suggested addition to 'date'

Julian Elischer wrote:
 > BTW I chose 's' without any research.. Date only has the short getopt so 
 > '--' doesn't work, but
 > there are lots of unsed letters..  a quick survey suggests maybe -p (pipe?)
 > (suggestions welcome) my favourites of s and f are already used on one 
 > system or another.

There's another possibility, which doesn't require a new
option letter at all.  You could add a new escape sequence
to the format string, e.g. "%*".  Whenever date(1) is
called with a format string containing that sequence, it
goes into filter mode and replaces the sequence with the
current line.  That would also enable you to be more
flexible with the placement of the timestamps.
For example:

$ printf 'foo\nbar\nbaz\n' | date +'%H:%M:%S %*'
16:39:58 foo
16:39:58 bar
16:39:58 baz

Best regards
   Oliver

PS:  Personally I would recommend installing gnu-awk (it
was formerly part of the FreeBSD base system, but it was
replaced by a crippled awk, unfortunately), instead of
hacking date.  I always install gnu-awk because it's so
useful.

$ printf 'foo\nbar\nbaz\n' | gawk '{print strftime("%T"), $0}'
16:41:06 foo
16:41:06 bar
16:41:06 baz

-- 
Oliver Fromme,  secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing
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