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From: CARTER@MITBATES.BITNET (Tony Carter - MIT Bates Linac)
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: Dates on the command line
Message-ID: <8710210903.AA28888@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Tue, 20-Oct-87 11:37:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8710210903.AA28888
Posted: Tue Oct 20 11:37:00 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 23-Oct-87 04:32:21 EDT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The ARPA Internet
Lines: 19

>I'm writing a fortran program that, among other things, accepts a date
>as part of the command line.  (ie:  STUFF/DATE=12-dec-1987:12:00:00.00)
>Getting the date and doing stuff with it is not a problem, however, it
>would be nice if the /DATE qualifier would understand "TODAY+12" or "YESTERDAY"
>"TOMORROW+12-", etc...  What performs these conversions for DCL commands ?
>(I understand everything must eventually end up as a quadword for $BINTIM
>and $ASCTIM...)  Are there routines (maybe that someone has written) to do
>this ?

You do not say how you are getting the date from the command line. If you are
using LIB$GET_FOREIGN then you're on your own. But if you are using the CLI
routines (ie CLI$GET_VALUE, CLI$PRESENT, etc...) and declare the qualifier as
having type $DATETIME then DCL will interpret the date for you. For instance,
using your example of "TODAY+12", DCL will decide what "today" is, add 12,
and then when you perform a CLI$GET_VALUE on that qualifier it will return a
string in the form of dd-mmm-yyyy. (Note that the double quotes around the
date are necessary when there is a +/- sign present)

See manual 7B "Command Definition" and 8A "Utility Routines" for more info.