Re: quarter code for date

[Pádraig Brady]

On 06/10/16 11:11, john woods wrote:
> date +%YW%V gives week and year; it would be nice if date +%YQ%q could
> return, eg 2016Q3 as having a quarters code in date would save AWKwardness
> or shell arithmetic.
> 
> Perhaps we could have
> %q 1,2,3,4
> %Q 1st quarter; 2nd quarter; 3rd quarter; 4th quarter
> 
> Regards ...

This is one of those marginal calls.

It's not that awkward to get the quarter number: $(( ($(date +%-m)-1)/3+1 ))
But I agree it would be useful to give the number directly.

Note you may want to raise your proposal with the glibc team also in their
strftime(3) interface; coreutils is hesitant to add new % modifiers in
date(1) without prior practice from C libraries.

Note ruby uses %Q to give the number of milliseconds since epoch.
So we might skip that?
BTW 1 -> 1st etc. functionality might be useful to add to numfmt(1).

Note perl Date::Format uses %q to give the quarter number, starting with 1

I'd be 60:40 for adding it.

thanks,
Pádraig