Undocumented feature of 'date -d'

[Bruce Jerrick]

The man page for date(1) does not document that a date string for the
-d (--date) option can be given as seconds-from-the-epoch, if preceded
by '@'.  E.g.: 'date -d @1243474654'.  (Do you have any idea how many
years I've been wanting that functionality, but thought that date didn't
do it???)

A fix (to man/date.1 of coreutils-7.2.tar.gz) is included below.

-- Bruce Jerrick


--- man/date.1.orig     2009-03-31 05:25:50.000000000 -0700
+++ man/date.1  2009-05-27 18:57:14.858100959 -0700
@@ -14,7 +14,9 @@
 Display the current time in the given FORMAT, or set the system date.
 .TP
 \fB\-d\fR, \fB\-\-date\fR=\fISTRING\fR
-display time described by STRING, not `now'
+display time described by STRING, not `now'.
+An integer STRING preceded by `@' is interpreted as
+seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC
 .TP
 \fB\-f\fR, \fB\-\-file\fR=\fIDATEFILE\fR
 like \fB\-\-date\fR once for each line of DATEFILE