Re: suggested addition to 'date'

On Friday 18 August 2006 10:45, Oliver Fromme wrote:
> 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

I prefer this of all the suggestions so far.

-- 
John Baldwin