NAME
hodie - Print current date and time... in Latin
SYNOPSIS
hodie [ OPTION ]...
DESCRIPTION
hodie prints out the current date using classic Latin, and in addition
also prints it out and time using Roman numerals.
OPTIONS
-h, --help
Print short help message with syntax
-v, --verbose
Print months and days (pridie, Kalends, Nones, Ides) full and
not the respective abbreviations (standard mode of operation)
Two occurrences of -v as well as the use of -vv or --extremely-
verbose will include the numerals where applicable fully
declined, as in ’ante diem quintum Kalends Septembres’.
-n, --numerals
Don’t print anything in Latin - only the date and time as Roman
numerals.
-x, --force-numerals
Print both the verbose latin and the date and time as Roman
numerals.
-c, --classic, --auc
Print the year in the classic manner ab urbe condita instead of
the more modern anno domini .
-ad, --ante-diem
Print the date expressing the number of days to the next main
day with the ante diem expression instead of ablative case.
-d, --date
Print out any date. This has a rather special syntax, with a
keyword following the -d flag choosing input format. See section
on DATE INPUT below.
-r, --republican OFFSET
Print out the date dated ab urbe tua condita with the offset
counted in years as compared to the modern european kalendar
(originating with the hypothetical birth of christ). hodie -r
-753 would be equivalent with hodie -c
--version
Print out the version number of this release and exit. No matter
whether other options appear on the command line or not.
DATE INPUT
Following the -d or the --date option flags, the first item must be one
of the following:
verbose
In this case, the year, month and day are given by following the
verbose keyword by the flags -y, --year, -m, --month, -d, --day
for year, month and date respectively
ymd After this flag, the date comes in the format YYYY-MM-DD , where
the numbers may be separated by any non-numeric character.
dmy With this flag, the date is given as DD-MM-YYYY
mdy With this flag, the date is given as MM-DD-YYYY Restrictions on
the characters that may replace the hyphen apply as above.
HISTORY
The story began on the 10. of August, 2000 (a.d. VI Id. Iul., MM).
Having finished most of my assignment for my two-month summer job at
Ericsson Eurolab Deutschland, Nuremberg, I was idling around on the
Internet, and stumbled over the dotcomma-challenges
<http://www.dotcomma.org> , where especially the Roman numeral
challenge started my mind.
Almost an hour hacking, and there it was, another hour, and the
language support was there. Before the night was over, I had written
this man page and had the layout of a decent Makefile drawn out
mentally.
At the end of the next day, I was so far that I actually had the
workings of RPM worked out, constructed a .rpm-package and a .src.rpm-
package, which was promptly released on my home-page, announced on
freshmeat and uploaded to metalab (apps/misc :-).
Response was quick and plentiful. By now, I have compilation reports
from Linux, FreeBSD and SCO Unixware 7; there are a few compability
issues to put aside, but it works surprisingly well.
RETURN VALUES
hodie returns zero. Always. If it doesn’t, then something is really bad
with the code.
For some really unreadable code, this means that hodie could be used as
a strange replacement for true
BUGS
It doesn’t sanity check the input... telling hodie to display the roman
form of the 99th of march gives a slightly jumbled output, which most
definitely does not make sense.
Reports are more than welcome (e-mail below).
AUTHOR
Now, who would come up with such a thing? Well, I’m Mikael Johansson,
a rather all-round geek from Stockholm. I’m gravely interested in
languages, in computers and in mathematics; a combination more
dangerous than you might think.
E-mails to <mikael@johanssons.org>
TODO
A double and triple grammar check (will be done as soon as I start my
university studies).
Check that it really does display correctly for all dates.
Implement a complementary, ancient Greek program :-)
Perhaps port/translate top, uptime, and other nice utilities to Latin
:-)
And, as always... Debugging debugging debugging!
SEE ALSO
date(1)