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Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2006 12:17:29 -0700
From: Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org>
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To: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org>
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Cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org, Oliver Fromme <olli@lurza.secnetix.de>
Subject: Re: suggested addition to 'date'
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John Baldwin wrote:

>On Friday 18 August 2006 10:45, Oliver Fromme wrote:
>  
>
>>Julian Elischer wrote:
>> > BTW I chose 's' without any research.. Date only has the short getopt so 
>> > '--' doesn't work, but
>> > there are lots of unsed letters..  a quick survey suggests maybe -p (pipe?)
>> > (suggestions welcome) my favourites of s and f are already used on one 
>> > system or another.
>>
>>There's another possibility, which doesn't require a new
>>option letter at all.  You could add a new escape sequence
>>to the format string, e.g. "%*".  Whenever date(1) is
>>called with a format string containing that sequence, it
>>goes into filter mode and replaces the sequence with the
>>current line.  That would also enable you to be more
>>flexible with the placement of the timestamps.
>>For example:
>>
>>$ printf 'foo\nbar\nbaz\n' | date +'%H:%M:%S %*'
>>16:39:58 foo
>>16:39:58 bar
>>16:39:58 baz
>>    
>>
>
>I prefer this of all the suggestions so far.
>  
>

The trouble wih this is that the format string is interpretted by 
strftime() and not by
date, so you would have to pre-parse the string which would be quite a 
bit of work.
The size of the patch wold blow out from the current 20 lines (or less) 
to many more.