Re: Date documentation

[Eric Blake]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2021 at 10:20:28AM -0700, Michael Partridge wrote:
> Hello,
> I am reading the date man page for the first time and it seems that a `+`
> must prefix a format string, but this requirement or behavior is not
> documented.

It is, although you may have missed it.

$ date --help |head -n1
Usage: date [OPTION]... [+FORMAT]

> 
> I think this default format string should appear in the man page as
> well.

It already does (since the man page is generated from the --help output):

NAME
       date - print or set the system date and time

SYNOPSIS
       date [OPTION]... [+FORMAT]
       date [-u|--utc|--universal] [MMDDhhmm[[CC]YY][.ss]]

In both places, the argument is written +FORMAT to make it obvious
that without a leading +, you are instead asking date to parse a
'MMDDhhmm' argument for setting the system date (likely to fail if not
executed as root).

That said, if you have a proposed patch to make the existing
documentation clearer, we're open to the idea.

-- 
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3266
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org