NAME

reldate

SYNOPSIS

reldate OPTIONS [TIME_DESCRPTION]

DESCRIPTION

reldate is a small command line utility which returns the relative date in YYYY-MM-DD format. This is helpful when scripting various time relationships. The difference in time returned are determined by the time increments provided.

Time increments are a positive or negative integer. Time unit can be either day(s), week(s), month(s), or year(s). Weekday names are case insentive (e.g. Monday and monday). They can be abbreviated to the first three letters of the name, e.g. Sunday can be Sun, Monday can be Mon, Tuesday can be Tue, Wednesday can be Wed, Thursday can be Thu, Friday can be Fri or Saturday can be Sat.

OPTIONS

-help

display help

-license

display license

-version

display version

-e, -end-of-month

Display the end of month day. E.g. 2012-02-29

-f, -from

Date the relative time is calculated from.

-nl, -newline

if true add a trailing newline

-quiet

suppress error messages

EXAMPLES

If today was 2014-08-03 and you wanted the date three days in the past try–

    reldate 3 days

The output would be

    2014-08-06

TIME UNITS

Supported time units are

• day(s)
• week(s)
• year(s)

Specifying a date to calucate from

reldate handles dates in the YYYY-MM-DD format (e.g. March 1, 2014 would be 2014-03-01). By default reldate uses today as the date to calculate relative time from. If you use the –from option you can it will calculate the relative date from that specific date.

   reldate --from=2014-08-03 3 days

Will yield

    2014-08-06

NEGATIVE INCREMENTS

Command line arguments traditionally start with a dash which we also use to denote a nagative number. To tell the command line process that to not treat negative numbers as an “option” precede your time increment and time unit with a double dash.

    reldate --from=2014-08-03 -- -3 days

Will yield

    2014-07-31

RELATIVE WEEK DAYS

You can calculate a date from a weekday name (e.g. Saturday, Monday, Tuesday) knowning a day (e.g. 2015-02-10 or the current date of the week) occurring in a week. A common case would be wanting to figure out the Monday date of a week containing 2015-02-10. The week is presumed to start on Sunday (i.e. 0) and finish with Saturday (e.g. 6).

    reldate --from=2015-02-10 Monday

will yield

    2015-02-09

As that is the Monday of the week containing 2015-02-10. Weekday names case insensitive and can be the first three letters of the English names or full English names (e.g. Monday, monday, Mon, mon).

reldate 1.2.10