reldate [OPTIONS] [TIME_DESCRPTION]
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.
-e Display the end of month day. E.g. 2012-02-29
-end-of-month Display the end of month day. E.g. 2012-02-29
-f Date the relative time is calculated from.
-from Date the relative time is calculated from.
-h display help
-help display help
-l display license
-license display license
-v display version
-version display version
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”
Supported time units are
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”
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” preceed your time increment and time unit with a double dash.
reldate --from=2014-08-03 -- -3 days
Will yield “2014-07-31”
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) occuring 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 yeild “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).