hroptatyr / dateutils

Dateutils are a bunch of tools that revolve around fiddling with dates and times on the command line with a strong focus on use cases that arise when dealing with large amounts of financial data.

Below is a short list of examples that demonstrate what dateutils can do, for full specs refer to the info and man pages. For installation instructions refer to the INSTALL file.

Dateutils commands are prefixed with a date but otherwise resemble known unix commands for reasons of intuition. The only exception being strptime which is analogous to the libc function of the same name.

A tool mimicking seq(1) but whose inputs are from the domain of dates rather than integers. Typically scripts use something like

with the additional benefit that the end date can be given directly instead of being computed from the start date and an interval in days. Also, it provides date specific features that would be a PITA to implement using the above seq(1)/date(1) approach, like skipping certain weekdays:

A tool to convert dates between different calendric systems and/or time zones. While other such tools usually focus on converting Gregorian dates to, say, the Chinese calendar, dconv aims at supporting calendric systems which are essential in financial contexts.

Leave a Comment