bug#37921: closed (date -d "a day ago" differs from date -d "1 day ago")

[GNU bug Tracking System]

Your message dated Tue, 29 Oct 2019 08:22:23 +0100
with message-id <address@hidden>
and subject line Re: bug#37921: date -d "a day ago" differs from date -d "1 day 
ago"
has caused the debbugs.gnu.org bug report #37921,
regarding date -d "a day ago" differs from date -d "1 day ago"
to be marked as done.

(If you believe you have received this mail in error, please contact
address@hidden.)


-- 
37921: http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=37921
GNU Bug Tracking System
Contact address@hidden with problems

--- Begin Message --- Subject: date -d "a day ago" differs from date -d "1 day ago" Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2019 13:59:07 +0000

When I ask date(1) for the date “a day ago”, I get a different result from

when I ask date(1) for the date “1 day ago”.

The results differ by 3 hours.

 

If I ask for UTC time, the results differ by 1 hour.

 

I’m not able to find anything in the manual to explain this difference.

I realize making sense of a natural language specification of a date is complicated.  Still, I wonder whether the difference in behavior is intentional and if so why.

 

$ for dash_u in '' '-u' ; do for one in 1 a ; do date $dash_u -d "$one day ago" ; done ; done

+ date -d '1 day ago'

Thu Oct 24 09:51:22 EDT 2019

+ date -d 'a day ago'

Thu Oct 24 06:51:22 EDT 2019

+ date -u -d '1 day ago'

Thu Oct 24 13:51:22 UTC 2019

+ date -u -d 'a day ago'

Thu Oct 24 14:51:22 UTC 2019

 

$ date --version

date (GNU coreutils) 8.26

Copyright (C) 2016 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.

This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.

There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

 

Written by David MacKenzie.

 

If you think this is a bug and you’d like a fix, I’d be happy to supply one.  Just let me know.  Thanks.

 

-Matt

--- End Message ---

> --- Begin Message ---
>
>
>
> Subject: 
>
> Re: bug#37921: date -d "a day ago" differs from date -d "1 day ago"
>
>
>
>
> Date: 
>
> Tue, 29 Oct 2019 08:22:23 +0100
>
>
>
>
> User-agent: 
>
> Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.1.0
>
>
>
>
> tag 37921 notabug
> thanks
>
> On 2019-10-25 18:23, Matt Carter wrote:
> > Thank you, Eric and Berny, for the explanation.
> > I'm glad to see it's intentional.  Thanks for teaching me about the military 
> > time zones.
>
> Thanks for the feedback.
> I'm hereby closing this issue in our bug tracker as "not a bug".
>
> Have a nice day,
> Berny
>
>
> --- End Message ---