Re: touch --date=TIME argument

[Pádraig Brady]

On 26/12/2020 13:06, Jeffrey Walton wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
>
> I'm trying to restore filetimes based on the timestamp from a ZIP file.
>
> I can extract the newest filetime from a ZIP with:
>
>      unzip -l "${file}" 2>&1 | head -n -3 | tail -n +4 | cut -b 12-27 |
> sort -r | uniq | head -n 1
>
> (The head and tail trims away header and footer cruft so only
> date/time's remain).
>
> That yields a date/time like:
>
>      12-31-1998 23:07
>
> When I plug it into 'touch' it results in:
>
>      Setting /var/www/html/crypto30.zip to 12-31-1998 23:07
>      touch: invalid date format ‘12-31-1998 23:07’
>
> Is there some way to get touch to accept the date/time from the ZIP archive?

Supported input formats are documented at:
https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Date-input-formats.html

In summary, if you're specifying numeric calendar items with dashes,
the order needs to be YY-MM-DD

So you could pipe through something like:

  sed 's/\([^-]*-[^-]*\)-\(....\)/\2-\1/'

cheers,
Pádraig