GNU bug report logs - #17765
julian date is not what you think

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From: Pádraig Brady <P <at> draigBrady.com>
To: Steve Zornes <boardstretcher <at> gmail.com>
Cc: 17765 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#17765: julian date is not what you think
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:04:16 +0100

tag notabug 17765
close 17765
stop

On 06/12/2014 05:56 PM, Steve Zornes wrote:
> the date command uses %j to specify number of days since beginning of year. It looks as though %j is meant to mean Julian day which is ACTUALLY the number of days since the julian calendar started. Currently 2,000,000 or so.
> number of days since the beginning of the year is called ordinal date and should be specified with a %o 
> just a thought. 		 	   		  

Stricktly you are correct, though calendars with the
ordinal day listed are often referred to julian calendars.
There is a long history of specifying this with %j.
See strftime, cal -j, etc.
So while %o is available, it's not worth the trouble to use for this IMHO.
In any case you wouldn't start changing this in date(1),
rather the POSIX standards for strftime() etc.
But again I don't think this is practical.

thanks,
Pádraig.

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