suggested addition to 'date'

[Julian Elischer]

Bakul Shah wrote:

>>To me it seems more natural to add the few extra lines to date because 
>>in my mind it is a natural
>>usage of date and extending date to be able to be used as a filter 
>>doesn't hurt existing functionality.
>>    
>>
>
>I may want to prepend a log line with not just a timestamp
>but also other information such as user, group, hostname etc.
>This change may be small but it does not belong in date(1).
>Just as I wouldn't want to extend hostname(1) to be a filter.
>It makes more sense to extend logger(1), not date(1).
>
>Don't mess with my date:-)
>  
>
Who's messing with date? it acts as before except if you need to 
annotate a stream with timestamps..
Now puting it in logger.. THAT is an unintuitive program to make into a 
date adding filter.

Date's job is to output the time.. it makes perfect sense to me to allow 
it to append the time to a stream as well.
logger's job is to send data to the syslog system, which already date 
stamps things.
It is not designed to be a filter but it already takes file input and 
outputs to stderr.

I really can't believe the people who are complaining about this.. I 
should have just committed it.
Talk about a bikeshed!