Fun with Date Arithmetic

We all know that the date command tells you the current time. Occasionally, you use the same command to set the time. That however becomes rarer these days with the advent of the ntp service that automatically synchronizes your computer's time with a super accurate public time server of your choice.

Various implementations of the date command are in use today. This article discusses the date command of the GNU coreutils package.

By default, the date command tells you the time now. The date command also lets you do some basic date addition and subtraction. This is achieved by specifying the -d option which displays a time that you entered as a parameter rather than now.

How many times have you asked yourself what the calendar date is N days ago? Just the other day, I needed to find out the precise date of 30 days ago in order to locate the proper log file.

$ date
Sat Nov 14 17:54:51 PST 2009
$ date -d -30days
Thu Oct 15 18:54:56 PDT 2009

Just like you use subtraction to calculate a back date, you use addition to calculate a forward date. The example below displays the date 30 days from today.

$ date -d +30days
Thu Oct 15 18:54:56 PDT 2009

Besides days as the unit, you can also manipulate years, months, hours, minutes, and seconds.

peter@tiger:~$ date -d +2months
Thu Jan 14 18:48:43 PST 2010

You can combine them together like this:

$ date -d +2months17days
Sun Jan 31 18:49:45 PST 2010

Note that all the above are calculated relative to today's date. What about queries like 10 days tomorrow?

$ date -d tomorrow+10days
date -d tomorrow+10days
Wed Nov 25 18:52:03 PST 2009

10 days yesterday?

$ date -d yesterday-10days
Tue Nov  3 18:53:07 PST 2009

You can also perform your arithmetic relative to a specific day, say January 21, 2010.

$ date -d '2010-01-21 + 2 weeks 3 days'
Sun Feb  7 00:00:00 PST 2010

Lastly, the date command also recognizes the day of weeks (Sunday, Monday, ...) and the 2 keywords "last" and "next".

$ date -d 'next tuesday + 1 day'
Wed Nov 18 00:00:00 PST 2009

I hope you have fun with this versatile tool.