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From: tale@cs.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.software.b
Subject: Re: Dates in C-news
Message-ID: <XJWGA+@rpi.edu>
Date: 24 Jan 90 03:00:36 GMT
References: <1556@fallst.UUCP> <1314@ursa-major.SPDCC.COM>
	<4831b2fb.bfe8@tachyon.engin.umich.edu>
	<1990Jan23.175245.18937@iwarp.intel.com> <C68n*p1@cs.psu.edu>
Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY
Lines: 50

Randal Schwartz <merlyn@iwarp.intel.com> wrote:
> I can write you a Perl program to translate it back, if you insist.

Y'know, as soon as I saw RandalL's name on that article I knew he was
going to offer a perl solution.

In <C68n*p1@cs.psu.edu> flee@shire.cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee) writes:
> Conversely, you can use
>          $NEWSBIN/getdate now 'now -1 day'
> to find out that it's now 633139077, and yesterday was 633052677.

Yes, you can.  That isn't always completely helpful though.  Sometime
last month someone asked me when a group here was created.  I think it
was alt.folklore.computers.  Well, active.times told me it was created
at 628900369.  Using the getdate approach I'd have to make a couple of
guesses to narrow it down a little and even then I'd have to spend
some extra time if I wanted to make it really accurate.  So I just
threw this trivial excuse for a programme in $NEWSBIN/maint/undate
and have found it handy when looking at a couple of times stored by C
News. 

Error is checking is non-existent -- non-numeric arguments all just
get turned into 0 by atol() and give you back the beginning of the
Unix epoch.  I don't really care; works just fine for my needs.

--
#include <stdio.h>
#include <time.h>

int
main (argc, argv)
     int argc;
     char **argv;

{
  extern long atol();
  long clock;
  
  if (!--argc) {
    (void)fprintf(stderr,"Usage: %s seconds_since_unix_epoch [...]\n",argv[0]);
    exit(1);
  }

  while (argc--) {
    clock = atol(*++argv);
    (void)fputs(ctime(&clock), stdout);
  }

  exit(0);
}