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)[reply]

When I first saw this article it reminded me of the Wikipedia Manual of Style which says: "Wikipedia is an encyclopedic reference, not an instruction manual, guidebook, or textbook" (WP:NOTHOW). So I tried to find information elsewhere about date (unix command) to see where the idea came from, who wrote the code, how has it developed over time etc etc but I didn’t find anything. I also noticed that it needed quite a bit of attention to its overall formatting. I fixed some issues but, looking at it again, I missed quite a few.

Seeing GelvinM's reference to echo (command), dirname and pwd, I've now looked at those articles and they are less about teaching readers the syntax, and more about explaining the context, so I can see why they are there. However, as a general point, the WP:WHATABOUTX essay says: "The nature of Wikipedia means that you cannot make a convincing argument based solely on whether other articles do or do not exist" so the existence of the dirname article doesn’t defend the existence of the date (Unix command) article. (An alternative argument might be that the command articles collectively form a set, but then we’re back to the NOTHOW problem.)

If this article stays, then it needs far more background information to turn it into an encyclopedia article. It also needs its remaining formatting issues sorting out, for example any quotation marks that don't need to be curly should be straight. (I know some Unix shells make special use of curly quotes so I’m not saying just take them all out.) There's a double-equals sign (==) in the article – is that a typo or does it have a meaning in that location? --Northernhenge (talk) 12:42, 24 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Linux manpage credits David MacKenzie. (I haven’t looked for a Unix manpage.) He doesn’t seem to have a wikipedia article. He’s been interviewed sometimes about his other work and has a video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7vfI-WSP8Q but there isn’t really much to be said about a date command. I’m still concerned about WP:NOTHOW (and although this isn’t a deletion argument, I’m still not convinced by the curly quotes and double-equals). The only reason I haven’t yet nominated it for deletion is that, following @Zeibgeist’s correct (in my view) change to a redirect, @GelvinM wanted to carry on working on it, but I can’t currently see what direction it could go in unfortunately. --Northernhenge (talk) 12:15, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The curly quotes were an artifact of composing the page in Open Office and == was an oversight. Thank you for pointing these out. I've made the corrections. I see the article as more about what the date command is about rather than a complete how to. As such I did not include a description of all or even most of the format codes available.

The main reasons I decided to create the page was that I came across Wikipedia references to the date command which led to the description of Unix time which said nothing about the command itself and is a separate topic. Winding up at the Unix time page would be very confusing.

A different argument I'd like to make is that Wikipedia is also about exposing relationships between different items of knowledge and serves to connect them, which is also what the article does.

Thank you for the video reference! Quite enjoyable. Not all Wikipedia articles have to include a historic component but they are interesting if they do so I took your suggestion and added one. I hope that satisfies your misgivings. David McKenzie is only the author of the Linux version of date and, as the video shows, he only encountered Unix at V4.2 in university so he could not have created the original. I suspect Bill Joy had a role in porting the AT&T version of date to BSD Unix but without a citation one cannot post that.

As to taking the article further, yes, I do have a couple of other ideas as well as references in other articles back to the page but I still need to get around to finding citations. In time that day will come. (pun intended) GelvinM (talk) 19:49, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]