Hello again,
To expand on my previous suggestion, I also believe it would be
beneficial to explicitly mention that literal characters (such as
underscores, dashes, or spaces) can be interspersed between specifiers.
Documenting this would help users craft more efficient and reliable date
commands. Without this knowledge, users may resort to concatenating
multiple subshells to achieve custom delimiters—for example, using
|$(date +%D)_$(date +%Y)| instead of the more efficient |$(date +%D_%Y)|.
Explicitly noting that literals are supported would encourage users to
write cleaner, more optimized code and avoid the unnecessary overhead
and error-prone syntax of multiple subshell calls.
Best regards,
Dmitri Seletski
On 30/09/2026 13:31, Dmitri Seletski wrote:
Hello,
I would like to suggest a minor addition to the |EXAMPLES| section of
the |date| manual to improve clarity for new users.
While the manual covers many complex formats, it lacks a simple,
single-specifier example that demonstrates the required |*+*| syntax.
I propose adding the following entry:
*Example:*
Display the current date in MM/DD/YY format:
|date +%D|
This provides a clear, immediate reference for the most common numeric
date representation.
Thank you for your time and for your incredible work on the GNU coreutils.
Best regards,
Dmitri Seletski
