bug#8782: date command

[Rick Stanley]

The date command is very useful.  A lot of features and options which I
take advantage of as I need them.  Every once in a while I need to use
the command to convert a UNIX Epoch Date to a normal date, so I attempt
to use the command as:

date -d 1306947372

Which results in the error message, "date: invalid date `1306947372'".

Neither 'date --help' or 'man date' shows that the command should have
been written as:

date -d @1306947372

I needed to do a Google search to see what I was doing wrong. (My memory
is not as good as it used to be!) ;^)

I don't know why this ('@') is needed, since the date command recognizes
many different date formats without specifying the format. For
completeness of the help and man page, please add a line explaining that
when passing a UNIX Epoch Date to the -d option, you need to prefix the
date with a '@'.

Thank you for your time and consideration!

Cheers!

Rick

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