Re: Self importance of U/L[nix] ?

On 2006-06-09, news wrote:

So I need to clear the Russian-flag virus off the DOS-fd0s of an old
portable box, which I'm giving to someone to be able to Tx/Rx files
by phone to/from me.

Since my version of the anti-virus reports "too old", I just set the DATE
back 2 years. So since I forgot to reset [easily done under DOS by just
manually copying the reportred 'date' and replacing "04" with "06"] after
I boot into linux - an annoyingly slow task [what about energy
conservation instead of having 24/7 for 2/7 usage ?], my mc sort by
recency is crap.

So, in linux I try to reset the date.
man date, date -?, date --help .....etc., what a load of ***!

Why can't they just give the obvious essentials FIRST !

Since setting the date is done very rarely (even before ntpd was
available), it's somewhat less than essential.

However, it is right at the top of the man page (second line under
synopsis):

DATE(1) User Commands DATE(1)



NAME
date - print or set the system date and time

SYNOPSIS
date [OPTION]... [+FORMAT]
date [-u|--utc|--universal] [MMDDhhmm[[CC]YY][.ss]]


Self important ?
date --set 06/10/06 == OK.

PS. after 10 years occasional linux usage & at least 5 different
name-installations, each which is more absurd, bloated Win-apeing,
I've NEVER seriously run as NON-root, because I never get a chance to
'settle down' out of bleeding-edge/research mode.

There's absolutely no reason to run as root, other than for
occasional tasks.

This because you have to do major research just to find out how to
set the time. Developers don't respect other people's time ?!


--
Chris F.A. Johnson, author <http://cfaj.freeshell.org>
Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress)
===== My code in this post, if any, assumes the POSIX locale
===== and is released under the GNU General Public Licence
.