Commands using date

Create a file with actual date as filename

More recent versions of the date command finally have the ability to decode the unix epoch time into a human readable date. This function makes it simple to utilize this feature quickly.

If you have used bash for any scripting, you've used the date command alot. It's perfect for using as a way to create filename's dynamically within aliases,functions, and commands like below.. This is actually an update to my first alias, since a few commenters (below) had good observations on what was wrong with my first command.

# creating a date-based ssh-key for askapache.github.com

# create a tar+gzip backup of the current directory

I personally find myself having to reference

quite a bit as a result. So this nice alias saves me a lot of time. This is one bdash mofo. Works in sh and bash (posix), but will likely need to be changed for other shells due to the parameter substitution going on.. Just extend the sed command, I prefer sed to pretty much everything anyways.. but it's always preferable to put in the extra effort to go for as much builtin use as you can. Otherwise it's not a top one-liner, it's a lazyboy recliner.

Here's the old version:

This trick from my [ http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html bash_profile ]

Several people have submitted commands to do this, but I think this is the simplest solution. It also happens to be the most portable one: It should work with any sh or csh derived shell under any UNIX-like OS.

Oh by the way, with my German locale ($LC_TIME set appropriately) it prints "g" most of the time, and sometimes (on Wednesdays) it prints "h". It never prints "y".

A command to find out what the day ends in. Can be edited slightly to find out what "any" output ends in.

NB: I haven't tested with weird and wonderful output.

The shell has perfectly adequate pattern matching for simple expressions.

(Useful when firewalls prevent you from using NTP.)

This produces a parseable output of the last day of the month in future or past. Change the '-v-0m' to be a month plus or minus from the current system time.

If you don't have netcat, you can use curl.

Good when firewalled and only in need of a reasonable accurate time.

Use a fast responding web server.

That works in all softs, CLI or GUI... I don't want to waste time to all the time typing the same stuff . So, I have that command in my window manager shortcuts ( meta+l ). All the window managers have editable shortcuts AFAIK. If not, or you don't want to use it that way, you can easily use the xbindkeys soft.

I you're using kde4, you can run :

then open "inputs actions" and create a new shortcut.

For Gnome take a look there : http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-create-keyboard-shortcuts-in-gnome/

A more advanced one, with strings and newlines :

For complicated or long paste, you can feed xvkbd with a file :

You can simulate ^C ( control+c ) too or others combinations of keys :

There's no man page nor help ( On my Archlinux distro ), but you can see online doc there : http://homepage3.nifty.com/tsato/xvkbd/

Not perl but shorter.

This script creates date based backups of the files. It copies the files to the same place the original ones are but with an additional extension that is the timestamp of the copy on the following format: YearMonthDay-HourMinuteSecond

already described on the other two versions, this one uses ascii characters on game style to display elapsed time.

Variation of the theme, this one blinks in low profile on top level of X, ie, it is visible, indeed small.

Try changing fonts and sizes of osd_cat

Works on real time clock, unix time based, decrementing the actual time from initial time saved in an environment variable exported to child process inside watch

Shows elapsed time from start of script in hh:mm:ss format

Non afected by system slow down due to the use of date.

See: http://imgur.com/JgjK2.png for example.

Do some serious benchmarking from the commandline. This will write to a file with the time it took to compress n bytes to the file (increasing by 1).

Run:

To see it in graph form.

The "-d" option for gnu's "date" command can calculate positive or negative offset from any time, including "now". You can even specify a source timezone (the output timezone can be set with the TZ environment variable). Useful! Fun! Not very well documented!

This is very useful if you need to show someone some text from a distance. (Like someone standing over your shoulder...)

I'd recommend aliasing it to something like:

alias osd_cat="osd_cat -o 400 -s 8 -c blue -d 60 -f -*-bitstream\ vera\ sans-*-*-*--200-*-*-*-*-*-*-*"

xosd is the utility that provides osd_cat.