Date accepts quite a lot of common formats. However, there is at least
one format which it does not recognize. It is very common in the Czech
Republic (and other central European countries AFAIK), and it has the
forms:

  DD.MM.YYYY
  DD.MM.YY

I wish the following command succeeded:

metuzalem:~# date -s "17.9.2003"
date: invalid date `17.9.2003'

(And I would expect it to set the date to "Wed Sep 17, 2003".)

I think, the following need to be changed:

  1) the parser in the getdate() function
  2) the Info documentation
     (see info sh-utils "date input formats" "calendar date items")

Hi.  It has been a while since you filed this report, so I'll start by
asking whether you still wish for this.

Dne 12/28/05 v 21:24:27 (+0100), Thomas Hood napsal(a):

Hi,

frankly, I'm quite surprised that this bug is not dead yet.  :)

Well, dates are written this way in many European countries, including
Germany, France and Italy, and it would be really neat if you could set
system date this way.  However, it's not hard to work around it, so if
the fix requires too much effort, let's drop it.

Best regards,
Petr Tesarik

Petr Tesarik wrote:

Date and time handling is already a nightmare.  I think we shouldn't make
it more complicated if we don't have to.