On Thu 17 Jul 2025 at 23:39:02 (+0200), [email protected] wrote: > Video durations are formatted in youtube's .info.json files as "HH:MM:SS"; ↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑
On Fri 18 Jul 2025 at 01:21:08 (+0200), [email protected] wrote: > OK, the Math is right, but the assumptions made by date aren't smart. I > "overtested" your one liner with the kinds of input you would grab using jq > from youtube .info.json files and to my amazement, when you only have two > semicolon separated values, the bash date utility assumes the first chunk to > be the hours and the second the minutes!: Times that are associated with dates, as in the date utility, are times of day, and these have to include an hour value in the range 0 through 24. For times that are durations, there's no such rule, and youtube's notation is just a sensible convention for measuring videos. It would be useless for giving the reverberation time of a concert hall, or the duration of a journey to Pluto. > I still think that there should be a way to make what I need straight forward > using date's own formatting. Your starting point with date would be the /time/: $ TZ=UTC date --date='@0' +'%s' 0 $ and then you would add /durations/ by using what is outlined in the section headed 'Relative items in date strings' from: $ info date … … However, I don't /think/ that date can syntactically handle a --date argument of that complexity (mixing an absolute and relative time), so using date at all is just a nasty hack. Cheers, David.
