Re: date -d20060229 gives: "invalid date"

[Paul Eggert]

Steve Cousins <address@hidden> writes:

> date Versions 5.96 and 5.97 (at least) have a bug when passing dates
> that are greater than the actual number of days in a month.  Previous
> versions (most of the machines seem to have 5.2.1) would convert the
> date to a correct date.

The change was advertised as a "new feature" in NEWS:

    Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.

>     date -d"20060201 - 1 day"
>
> does not work.  It reports Feb 2.

Try this:

   date -u -d"2006-02-01 -1 day"

The "-u" is to avoid problems with DST transitions.