NAME¶
hodie - Print current date and time... in Latin
SYNOPSIS¶
hodie [
OPTION ]...
DESCRIPTION¶
hodie prints out the current date using classic Latin, and in addition
also prints it out and time using Roman numerals.
OPTIONS¶
- -h, --help
- Print short help message with syntax
- -v, --verbose
- Print months and days (pridie, Kalends, Nones, Ides) full and not the
respective abbreviations (standard mode of operation)
Two occurrences of -v as well as the use of -vv or
--extremely-verbose will include the numerals where applicable fully
declined, as in 'ante diem quintum Kalends Septembres'.
- -n, --numerals
- Don't print anything in Latin - only the date and time as Roman
numerals.
- -x, --force-numerals
- Print both the verbose latin and the date and time as Roman numerals.
- -c, --classic, --auc
- Print the year in the classic manner ab urbe condita instead of the
more modern anno domini .
- -a, --ante-diem
- Print the date expressing the number of days to the next main day with the
ante diem expression instead of ablative case.
- -d, --date
- Print out any date. This has a rather special syntax, with a keyword
following the -d flag choosing input format. See section on DATE
INPUT below.
- -r, --republican OFFSET
- Print out the date dated ab urbe tua condita with the offset
counted in years as compared to the modern european kalendar (originating
with the hypothetical birth of christ). hodie -r -753 would
be equivalent with hodie -c
- --version
- Print out the version number of this release and exit. No matter whether
other options appear on the command line or not.
Following the
-d or the
--date option flags, the first item
must be one of the following:
- verbose
- In this case, the year, month and day are given by following the
verbose keyword by the flags -y, --year, -m, --month, -d,
--day for year, month and date respectively
- ymd
- After this flag, the date comes in the format YYYY-MM-DD , where
the numbers may be separated by any non-numeric character.
- dmy
- With this flag, the date is given as DD-MM-YYYY
- mdy
- With this flag, the date is given as MM-DD-YYYY Restrictions on the
characters that may replace the hyphen apply as above.
HISTORY¶
The story began on the 10. of August, 2000 (a.d. VI Id. Iul., MM). Having
finished most of my assignment for my two-month summer job at Ericsson Eurolab
Deutschland, Nuremberg, I was idling around on the Internet, and stumbled over
the dotcomma-challenges
<http://www.dotcomma.org> , where
especially the Roman numeral challenge started my mind.
Almost an hour hacking, and there it was, another hour, and the
language
support was there. Before the night was over, I had written this man page
and had the layout of a decent
Makefile drawn out mentally.
At the end of the next day, I was so far that I actually had the workings of
RPM worked out, constructed a .rpm-package and a .src.rpm-package,
which was promptly released on my home-page, announced on freshmeat and
uploaded to metalab (apps/misc :-).
Response was quick and plentiful. By now, I have compilation reports from Linux,
FreeBSD and SCO Unixware 7; there are a few compability issues to put aside,
but it works surprisingly well.
RETURN VALUES¶
hodie returns zero. Always. If it doesn't, then something is
really bad with the code.
For some really unreadable code, this means that
hodie could be used as a
strange replacement for
true
BUGS¶
It doesn't sanity check the input... telling
hodie to display the roman
form of the 99th of march gives a slightly jumbled output, which most
definitely does not make sense.
Reports are more than welcome (e-mail below).
AUTHOR¶
Now, who would come up with such a thing? Well, I'm Mikael Johansson, a rather
all-round geek from Stockholm. I'm gravely interested in languages, in
computers and in mathematics; a combination more dangerous than you might
think.
E-mails to
<mikael@johanssons.org>
SEE ALSO¶
date(1)