Printing previous dates with the FreeBSD date utility

In a previous post, I described how to get the date for a day in the past. This method unfortunately doesn’t work on FreeBSD hosts, since FreeBSD doesn’t come with the GNU date utility. As an alternative to GNU date, you can pass a time value to the date utilities “-v” option to print a date in the past:

$ date -v-2d
Mon Jan 1 13:02:57 EST 2007

I think I prefer the GNU date syntax, but this seems to work pretty well.

One Comment

chud3001  on June 2nd, 2010

Sweet, thanks Matty!

I’ve gleaned so much useful info from your site, I feel like I owe you a beer.. or three. If you’re every in Edmonton look me up.

-J

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