Talk:Date (Unix command)

Significance of this page

@User:Zeibgeist - I appreciate your offer to discuss this page and the redirect from Unix (date). As a courtesy I would have appreciated having this discussion before you decided to delete the content.

The Unix time page which is about how time is represented in Unix systems is a different topic. The redirect to List of POSIX commands is also a loss of information as it lacks details about the parameters of the command. It also failed to mention that date can also set the time, which I will correct shortly.

The date command is not as trivial as a WP:GNG designation would make it, and there are simpler commands such as echo, dirname and pwd that have their own Wikipedia pages.

Features such as recommended input formats for the -d flag and relative time offsets are not usually included in Unix man pages and are buried in the gnu coreutils documentation. The superuser requirement for setting the date is also not mentioned - I've added a source for this.

For the above reasons I have reverted your changes.

There are two environment variables that alter the date presentation - LC_TIME and TZ. I had originally intended to include this information but did not have a source beyond my personal knowledge of the command. I've since located sources for each and have added these changes. GelvinM (talk) 23:12, 23 March 2025 (UTC)