Unix date magic

The Unix date command has a cool feature I didn’t know about (hat tip to Dave C. for his comment about it on Dr. Drang’s blog). Turns out you can add multiple -v options to adjust dates — for example, to get the date of last Friday:

$ date -v -fri
Fri Sep 21 ... 2012

Or next Thursday:

$ date -v +thu
Thu Sep 27 ... 2012

Or the next Tuesday after two weeks from today:

$ date -v +2w -v +tue
Tue Oct 2 ... 2012

Or thirty seconds from now:

$ date -v +30S

Or five hours ago:

$ date -v -5H

Or ten years, a month, and three days from now (and no, I have no idea why you’d use something like that):

$ date -v +10y -v +1m -v +3d
Thu Oct 27 ... 2022

And so on.