suggested addition to 'date'

[Sam Leffler]

Julian Elischer wrote:
> At various times I've wanted to add timestamps to logfiles as they are
> generated..
> 
> usually this has involved perl or something to do it.
> 
> finally I broke down and just added  a small bit to date(1)
> 
> the -s option tells date to add a timestamp on the front of every line
> read in through stdin
> and put it out through stdout.   teh format of the datestamp is governed
> exactly as usual so:
> 
> %ls | ./date -s +"%+: "
> Fri Aug 11 19:53:34 PDT 2006: CVS
> Fri Aug 11 19:53:34 PDT 2006: Makefile
> Fri Aug 11 19:53:34 PDT 2006: date
> Fri Aug 11 19:53:34 PDT 2006: date.1
> Fri Aug 11 19:53:34 PDT 2006: date.1.gz
> Fri Aug 11 19:53:34 PDT 2006: date.c
> Fri Aug 11 19:53:34 PDT 2006: date.o
> Fri Aug 11 19:53:34 PDT 2006: extern.h
> Fri Aug 11 19:53:34 PDT 2006: netdate.c
> Fri Aug 11 19:53:34 PDT 2006: netdate.o
> Fri Aug 11 19:53:34 PDT 2006: vary.c
> Fri Aug 11 19:53:34 PDT 2006: vary.h
> Fri Aug 11 19:53:34 PDT 2006: vary.o
> %ls | ./date -s +"%s: "
> 1155351474: CVS
> 1155351474: Makefile
> 1155351474: date
> 1155351474: date.1
> 1155351474: date.1.gz
> 1155351474: date.c
> 1155351474: date.o
> 1155351474: extern.h
> 1155351474: netdate.c
> 1155351474: netdate.o
> 1155351474: vary.c
> 1155351474: vary.h
> 1155351474: vary.o
> %
> I attach the diff.
> I'm sure that someone who is a more competent practicioner of userland C
> programming
> can probably clean this up abit.
> 
> do people think this is a worthwhile addition?
> 
> An easy to imagine use for this is to add it in the makefile for /usr so
> that "make buildworld" datestamped its output
> (for example).
> 
> it makes it easy to timestamp output from a console logger for example:

pbj% ls | sed -e "s/^/`date +'%+: '`/"
Fri Aug 11 20:18:05 PDT 2006: Desktop
Fri Aug 11 20:18:05 PDT 2006: Desktop DB
Fri Aug 11 20:18:05 PDT 2006: Desktop DF
Fri Aug 11 20:18:05 PDT 2006: Documents
Fri Aug 11 20:18:05 PDT 2006: Library
Fri Aug 11 20:18:05 PDT 2006: Movies
	...