hodie - Print current date and time... in Latin

hodie [ OPTION ]...

hodie prints out the current date using classic Latin, and in addition also prints it out and time using Roman numerals.

-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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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.johansson@wineasy.se>

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!

date(1)