Path: utzoo!lsuc!ncrcan!brian
From: brian@ncrcan.Toronto.NCR.COM (Brian Onn)
Newsgroups: tor.news
Subject: Re: Long message IDs (was Re: attcan't?)
Message-ID: <1396@ncrcan.Toronto.NCR.COM>
Date: 10 May 89 20:13:11 GMT
References: <1394@ncrcan.Toronto.NCR.COM> <610787517.10071@ontmoh.UUCP>
Reply-To: brian@ncrcan.Toronto.NCR.COM (Brian Onn)
Organization: NCR Canada Ltd., Mississauga, Ontario
Lines: 42

In article <1394@ncrcan.Toronto.NCR.COM>, I said:
...
[ quoting Evan, who says:]
>>This way, an article could be: <610566286.20194@foo.bar>
> [This] may not be as easily generated from standard unix tools, though.
> [The current C News IDs are shell scriptable using date and expr]
> The new method (if adopted) would require a helper program.

and then ...

In article <610787517.10071@ontmoh.UUCP>
			peter@ontmoh.UUCP (Peter Renzland) writes:
>You mean like this?:
>
>	TZ=GMT0GMT export TZ
>	set -- `date "+ %y %j %H %M %S"`
>	EPOCHDATE=`expr $5 + 60 \* \( $4 + 60 \* \( $3 + 24 \* \( $2 - 1 + \( \( $1 - 69 \) / 4 \) + 365 \* \( $1 - 70 \) \) \) \)`
>
>That's how Shnews does it.
>
>-- 
>Peter Renzland @ Ontario Ministry of Health  416/964-9141  peter@ontmoh.UUCP

Yeah, I mean like that.  Ok, so it's possible to do this with date and expr
too, using the perfect example of an expr contortion above :-)  But this 
still may not be OK in a general purpose News distribution, as all 
implementations of date(1) do not support the format string concept.
However, I will not be so narrow minded this time and say that it cannot
be done in a shell script.  Somebody could write an awk script to take
the standard date format "Wed May 10 19:45:02 GMT 1989" and convert it
into a 9 digit seconds string.

So I conclude with a different position than I had taken previously, 
but honestly have forgotten why it was important to be able to do this
in a shell script :-)

Brian.
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