GNU bug report logs - #17161
date: confusing: "TIME -/+NUM" treated as time zone

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Message #21 received at 17161 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Eric Blake <eblake <at> redhat.com>
To: "Marc R.J. Brevoort" <mrjb <at> dnd.utwente.nl>, 17161 <at> debbugs.gnu.org,
 Bug-gnulib <bug-gnulib <at> gnu.org>
Subject: Re: bug#17161: closed (Re: bug#17161: Bug in date arithmetic of date)
Date: Wed, 02 Apr 2014 05:27:43 -0600

[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]

reopen 17161
thanks

On 04/02/2014 02:17 AM, Marc R.J. Brevoort wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> As a heads-up, the explanation that this is due to time zone+locale
> doesn't make sense:
> 
> mrjb <at> THE-D-MRJB:~$ date --utc -d "2014-03-11 12:34:56 -1 day" +"%Y-%m-%d
> %H:%M:%S"
> 2014-03-12 13:34:56
> mrjb <at> THE-D-MRJB:~$ date --utc -d "2014-03-11 12:34:56 -2 days"
> +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"
> 2014-03-12 14:34:56
> mrjb <at> THE-D-MRJB:~$ date --utc -d "2014-03-11 12:34:56 -3 days"
> +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"
> 2014-03-12 15:34:56
> 
> The more days I subtract, the more hours are added. If this were a time
> zone issue, the amount of hours added would be constant but the
> resulting date would not.

Thanks for persisting.  I was able to reproduce using coreutils.git, and
I can explain what's happening.  Date is parsing this as:

"(2014-03-11 12:34:56 -3) (days)"

that is, -3 is being treated as the timezone, since it occurs next to
the hour specification; then treating "days" as "+1 day" or "+24 hours".

Watch what happens when you reorder the line to force a different parse:

$ src/date --utc -d "-3 days 2014-03-11 12:34:56" +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"
2014-03-08 12:34:56

It does indeed seem awkward that date is not parsing this as:

"(2014-03-11 12:34:56) (-3 days)"

but fixing that will require tweaks to the getdate.y parser in gnulib.
I've reopened the bug to track the issue with awkward precedence in the
parser.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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