Re: gawk manual time functions Info manual missing vital referral

[Aharon Robbins]

Greetings. Re this:

> From: Dan Jacobson <address@hidden>
> Subject: gawk manual time functions Info manual missing vital referral
> Date: 25 Feb 2001 16:00:52 +0800
>
> The Info page "File: gawk.info, Node: Time Functions" is lacking in
> that it instructs the user how to produce and also convert dates of
> the format 983087570 into the format Sun Feb 25 15:52:44 CST 2001
> etc., but does not instruct how to turn them back.  It should refer
> the user to the "date" shell command to turn them back.
> -- 
> http://www.geocities.com/jidanni Tel886-4-25854780 e-mail:restore .com.

Thanks for your note.  The gawk doc doesn't mention this because there
are older systems where this isn't true.  Either the date command doesn't
accept a format argument, or there isn't a portable, standard format to
convert back to a timestamp.

All is not lost, however.  The 3.1 version of gawk has a built-in mktime()
function for converting dates back to timestamps.  A beta version of
gawk 3.1 is now available.  You can get it from:

        ftp://ftp.freefriends.org/arnold/gawk/gawk-3.0.95.tar.gz

Thanks,

Arnold
--
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