Re: Full Julian date in date command formatting options?

[Bob Proulx]

Erik Auerswald wrote:
> Eric Blake wrote:
> >>>If the astronomical term is what you want, then maybe you really
> >>>do have a format that cannot be expressed in any existing
> >>>notation, and maybe it really is worth burning a % notation.  But
> >>>how common is the Astronomical Julian Date in shell programming?
> >>
> >>I instinctively turned to 'date' for the full Julian date for
> >>astronomical purposes, but I concede that this is not an
> >>incredibly common use case.
> 
> I'd say that 'date' is the natural program to try for date
> manipulations. ;-)
> 
> GNU systems are very useful in scientific settings, IMHO adding full
> Julian date in the astronomical sense to 'date' further enhances
> this.

I will just say that when I played with amateur astronomy one of the
first things I did was write conversion routines to convert to and
from the Julian Day Number.  I wasn't writing in shell so it wasn't
something that 'date' would have helped me with doing.  But in
astronomy it seems like one of the fundamental operations.  I don't
know if there are many astronomers that program in shell though since
the shell is limited on high precision math.  But it would probably be
a useful program generating timestamps for example.

Bob