The Versatile date Command

*nix systems comes with a date command line utility. Many people use it to view the current time, however there''s much more that date can do.

For example we run a daily job to process yesterday data. The job is a Python script that get the date as a paramter in YYYYMMDD format. This translates to one cron line:

@daily /path/to/job.py $(date --date=yesterday +%Y%m%d)

Here are some things you can do with date:


As a bonus, there is also a cal command which displays calender. Note that years are 4 digits so cal 4 14 will diaplay April for the year 14, not 2014.

cal has a handy -w switch that shows the work week as well.'