Re: date -d20060229 gives: "invalid date"

[Steve Cousins]

Paul Eggert wrote:

> 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.
>  
Hi Paul,

Thanks for the reply.

Don't I love new "features" like this?!  What is the purpose of this?  I 
guess I'll look it up. ... It looks like there was no discussion. Just a 
quick statement.
How is it more useful to report an error rather than doing a meaningful 
conversion?

> >    date -d"20060201 - 1 day"
> >
> > does not work.  It reports Feb 2.
> >    
>
> Try this:
>
>   date -u -d"2006-02-01 -1 day"
>
>  

Well, by putting in the hyphens it does work.  The -u (at least in this 
example) doesn't seem to do anything.  However, doing:

   date.5.96 -u -d"20060201 -1 day"    

reports

   date.5.96: invalid date `20060201 -1 day'

whereas:

   date.5.2.1 -u -d"20060201 - 1 day"

reports

   Thu Feb  2 00:00:00 UTC 2006

Which is wrong but it at least tries to deal with dates in the form 
YYYYMMDD.  Is this a bug or a feature? 

Thanks,

Steve