Wicked Cool Shell Scripts

#50 Setting the System Date

Conciseness is the heart of Unix and has clearly affected its evolution in quite a dramatic manner. However, there are some areas where this zeal for succinctness can drive a sysadmin batty. One of the most common annoyances in this regard is the format required for resetting the system date, as shown by the date command:

usage: date [[[[[cc]yy]mm]dd]hh]mm[.ss]

Trying to figure out all the square brackets can be baffling, without even talking about what you do or don't need to specify. Instead, a shell script that prompts for each relevant field and then builds the compressed date string is a sure sanity saver.

The Code

 #!/bin/sh # setdate - Friendly front end to the date command. # Date wants: [[[[[cc]yy]mm]dd]hh]mm[.ss] ...