Incoming from Daniel R. Oelke:

[presumably piete brooks?]:

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PS3: I'd like to get the raw date in brloop (a sh script). In perl I'd just use "time", and I can't see a way to get "date +" to yield the raw time. I could use "date=`perl -e 'print time'`" but that seems OTT, and perl may not be on teh users PATH. Any suggestions ?

[anonymous?]

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"date '+%s'" does it under BSDI, but I'm not sure how portable it is.

This is what I got from SunOS 4.1.x

$ date +%s date: bad format character - s

On Ultrix, I get: $_ date '+%s' s $_ and on OSF/1: $_ date '+%s' %s $_ XMan (OSF/1) says: "To display the date and time in a specified format, enter: date +"%r %d %h %y (%a)" [note the `+' outside the ""] which gives me: 08:58:39 AM 29 Aug 95 (Tue) FWIW ... -- "Remember, obsolescence (Win95) isn't an accident; it's an art form!" keelings@wu1.wl.aecl.ca s. keeling, aecl - whiteshell labs