happy sequence day!

Nerd content high, but still pretty accessible to normal people, methinks… Give it a shot, and see what passes for humour in some of my circles.

From the handbook of stupid Unix tricks:

[achiang@ethanol ~]$ man date
NAME
       date - print or set the system date and time

DESCRIPTION
       Display the current time in the given FORMAT, or set the system date.

       -d, --date=STRING
              display time described by STRING, not ‘now’

Normal people, “man date” is how you say, “show me the manual page for the date command (which is how you print or set the computer’s date/time)”. It is not, um, well, whatever else you may think it means.

Anyway, now we’re armed with the knowledge of how to use the Unix date command, and we also know what happens if we give it the -d option:

[achiang@ethanol ~]$ date -d '@01234567890'
Fri Feb 13 16:31:30 MST 2009

Ta daaaaa!