One of the joys of Linux is the voyage of discovery. Not just in Linux itself, but the GNU tools that support it. Today, for example, I was working on a short TV reminder script and needed to know the day. Well, that's easy: use date +%A.

I then needed to the day in two days time. I started thinking about using expr, or a Perl script, or something else even more unwieldy. I then discovered (thanks, once more, to Google) this site, which informed me about:


date -d "1 day ago"


Truly brilliant. Now, it's only the GNU tools that do this, but what a great extension. To get my answer of "in 2 days time" it was simply a case of thinking backwards to know that:

date -d "5 day ago"

was equivalent. Although further probing caused me to note:

date -d "2 tomorrow"

This is my prefered solution since I can also retrieve the correct date too, should I need it.