Re: date -d20060229 gives: "invalid date"

[Paul Eggert]

Steve Cousins <address@hidden> writes:

> Don't I love new "features" like this?!  What is the purpose of this?

Don't you just love date string parsing?  It's a subtle area, full of
surprises.

> How is it more useful to report an error rather than doing a
> meaningful conversion?

Because there's no such thing as a "meaningful conversion" that makes
everyone happy if you have an invalid date.  Invalid dates are
inherently ambiguous.  Is "Feb 29, 2006" actually Feb 28 or Mar 1?  Is
02:30 on April 2, 2006 actually 03:30 or 01:30?  You can come up with
good arguments either way.  We warn users about the ambiguities by
saying "no, you must write something like '2004-02-29 +2 years' if you
want to add two years to a date".  This avoids the ambiguity for "Feb
29, 2006".

> Is this a bug or a feature?

When it comes to parsing long digit strings, everything is a bug.  (:-)

Use the hyphens; they are your friends.