DATESORT(1)

📦
version 0.4.11 · 5 versions
, in alpine 3.24, fedora 43, fedora 44, nixos 26.05, nixpkgs unstable, opensuse-leap 16.0

🎀 DATESORT(1) — User Commands 🎀

okay so bestie, pull up a chair because we're about to talk about datesort, a little icon from the User Commands corner of the manual (that's the (1) bit, iykyk). It sorts your file by time, chronologically, and it is lowkey one of the most useful things ever. Let's go. 💅

📛 NAME

datesort — Sort contents of FILE chronologically.

🌸 SYNOPSIS

datesort [OPTION]...  [FILE]...

✨ DESCRIPTION

Sort contents of FILE chronologically. If FILE is omitted read from stdin. 🫶

The first date/time value per line is the sort key. Dates without times account for a smaller value than any date/time on the same day. Times without dates account for a smaller value than any date or date/time. If a line contains no dates or times or date/times it is sorted towards the front. 💀 (yes, the undateable lines get banished to the top, that's just the vibe)

Recognized OPTIONs:

🎀 OPTIONS

  • -h, --help — Print help and exit. your little emergency exit, no shame 💖
  • -V, --version — Print version and exit.
  • -i, --input-format=STRING... — Input format, can be used multiple times. Each date/time will be passed to the input format parsers in the order they are given, if a date/time can be read successfully with a given input format specifier string, that value will be used. (basically: it tries your formats one by one until one of them actually eats the date, and that's the one that wins ✨)
  • -b, --base=DT — For underspecified input use DT as a fallback to fill in missing fields. Also used for ambiguous format specifiers to position their range on the absolute time line. Must be a date/time in ISO8601 format. If omitted defaults to the current date/time.
  • -e, --backslash-escapes — Enable interpretation of backslash escapes in the input format specifier strings.
  • --from-locale=LOCALE — Interpret dates on stdin or the command line as coming from the locale LOCALE, this would only affect month and weekday names as input formats have to be specified explicitly.
  • --from-zone=ZONE — Interpret dates on stdin or the command line as coming from the time zone ZONE.
  • -r, --reverse — Reverse the sort order. chaos mode, but make it chronological-in-reverse 🌈
  • -u, --unique — Print at most one line per date/time value. dedupe queen 👑

🗓️ FORMAT SPECS

Format specs in dateutils are similar to posix' strftime().

However, due to a broader range of supported calendars dateutils must employ different rules. (they're doing the most, and honestly? iconic)

💜 Date specs

  • %a — The abbreviated weekday name
  • %A — The full weekday name
  • %_a — The weekday name shortened to a single character (MTWRFAS)
  • %b — The abbreviated month name
  • %B — The full month name
  • %_b — The month name shortened to a single character (FGHJKMNQUVXZ)
  • %c — The count of the weekday within the month (range 00 to 05)
  • %C — The count of the weekday within the year (range 00 to 53)
  • %d — The day of the month, 2 digits (range 00 to 31)
  • %D — The day of the year, 3 digits (range 000 to 366)
  • %F — Equivalent to %Y-%m-%d (ymd's canonical format)
  • %g — ISO week date year without the century (range 00 to 99)
  • %G — ISO week date year including the century
  • %j — Equivalent to %D
  • %m — The month in the current calendar (range 00 to 12)
  • %Q — The quarter of the year (range Q1 to Q4)
  • %q — The number of the quarter (range 01 to 04)
  • %s — The number of seconds since the Epoch.
  • %u — The weekday as number (range 01 to 07, Sunday being 07)
  • %U — The week count, day of week is Sun (range 00 to 53)
  • %V — The ISO week count, day of week is Mon (range 01 to 53)
  • %w — The weekday as number (range 00 to 06, Sunday being 00)
  • %W — The week count, day of week is Mon (range 00 to 53)
  • %y — The year without a century (range 00 to 99)
  • %Y — The year including the century
  • %_y — The year shortened to a single digit
  • %Z — The zone offset in hours and minutes (HH:MM) with a preceding sign (+ for offsets east of UTC, - for offsets west of UTC)
  • %Od — The day as roman numerals
  • %Om — The month as roman numerals
  • %Oy — The two digit year as roman numerals
  • %OY — The year including the century as roman numerals
  • %rs — In time systems whose Epoch is different from the unix Epoch, this selects the number of seconds since then.
  • %rY — In calendars with years that don't coincide with the Gregorian years, this selects the calendar's year.
  • %dth — The day of the month as an ordinal number, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.
  • %mth — The month of the year as an ordinal number, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.
  • %db — The business day of the month (since last month's ultimo)
  • %dB — Number of business days until this month's ultimo

⏰ Time specs

  • %H — The hour of the day using a 24h clock, 2 digits (range 00 to 23)
  • %I — The hour of the day using a 12h clock, 2 digits (range 01 to 12)
  • %M — The minute (range 00 to 59)
  • %N — The nanoseconds (range 000000000 to 999999999)
  • %p — The string AM or PM, noon is PM and midnight is AM.
  • %P — Like %p but in lowercase
  • %S — The (range 00 to 60, 60 is for leap seconds)
  • %T — Equivalent to %H:%M:%S
not me noticing %S's description is missing a word in the original manpage 😭 bestie the source itself dropped a syllable. anyway, that's verbatim what it says, we don't make the rules.

🌟 General specs

  • %n — A newline character
  • %t — A tab character
  • %% — A literal % character

🧚 Modifiers

  • %O — Modifier to turn decimal numbers into Roman numerals
  • %r — Modifier to turn units into real units
  • %0 — Modifier to turn on zero prefixes
  • %SPC — Modifier to turn on space prefixes
  • %- — Modifier to turn off prefixes altogether
  • th — Suffix, read and print ordinal numbers
  • b — Suffix, treat days as business days
⚠️ By design dates before 1601-01-01 are not supported. like, the door is closed, the sign says gone fishin', don't try it 💀

For conformity here is a list of calendar designators and their corresponding format string:

  • ymd → %Y-%m-%d
  • ymcw → %Y-%m-%c-%w
  • ywd → %rY-W%V-%u
  • bizda → %Y-%m-%db
  • lilian → n/a
  • ldn → n/a
  • julian → n/a
  • jdn → n/a
  • matlab → n/a
  • mdn → n/a

These designators can be used as output format string, moreover, @code{lilian}/@code{ldn} and @code{julian}/@code{jdn} can also be used as input format string. (yes, the @code{} thingies are in the original too — we're being faithful, bestie 🫶)

🌈 EXAMPLES

here come the receipts, and every single one of them slays ✨

$ datesort < "$@{srcdir@}/caev_01.txt"
2009-06-03 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2009-06-03" nett/GBX="5.2"
2010-11-17 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2010-11-17" nett/GBX="2.85"
2011-11-16 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2011-11-16" nett/GBX="3.05"
2012-06-06 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2012-06-06" nett/GBX="6.47"
2013-06-12 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2013-06-12" nett/GBX="6.92"
2013-11-20 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2013-11-20" nett/GBX="3.53"
$
$ datesort "$@{srcdir@}/caev_01.txt"
2009-06-03 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2009-06-03" nett/GBX="5.2"
2010-11-17 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2010-11-17" nett/GBX="2.85"
2011-11-16 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2011-11-16" nett/GBX="3.05"
2012-06-06 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2012-06-06" nett/GBX="6.47"
2013-06-12 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2013-06-12" nett/GBX="6.92"
2013-11-20 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2013-11-20" nett/GBX="3.53"
$
$ datesort -r < "$@{srcdir@}/caev_01.txt"
2013-11-20 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2013-11-20" nett/GBX="3.53"
2013-06-12 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2013-06-12" nett/GBX="6.92"
2012-06-06 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2012-06-06" nett/GBX="6.47"
2011-11-16 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2011-11-16" nett/GBX="3.05"
2010-11-17 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2010-11-17" nett/GBX="2.85"
2009-06-03 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2009-06-03" nett/GBX="5.2"
$
$ datesort -r "$@{srcdir@}/caev_01.txt"
2013-11-20 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2013-11-20" nett/GBX="3.53"
2013-06-12 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2013-06-12" nett/GBX="6.92"
2012-06-06 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2012-06-06" nett/GBX="6.47"
2011-11-16 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2011-11-16" nett/GBX="3.05"
2010-11-17 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2010-11-17" nett/GBX="2.85"
2009-06-03 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2009-06-03" nett/GBX="5.2"
$
$ datesort -u < "$@{srcdir@}/caev_02.txt"
2009-06-03 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2009-06-03" nett/GBX="5.2"
2010-11-17 caev="XXXX" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2010-11-17"
2011-11-16 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2011-11-16" nett/GBX="3.05"
2012-06-06 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2012-06-06" nett/GBX="6.47"
2013-06-12 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2013-06-12" nett/GBX="6.92"
2013-11-20 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2013-11-20" nett/GBX="3.53"
$
$ datesort -u "$@{srcdir@}/caev_02.txt"
2009-06-03 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2009-06-03" nett/GBX="5.2"
2010-11-17 caev="XXXX" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2010-11-17"
2011-11-16 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2011-11-16" nett/GBX="3.05"
2012-06-06 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2012-06-06" nett/GBX="6.47"
2013-06-12 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2013-06-12" nett/GBX="6.92"
2013-11-20 caev="DVCA" secu="VOD" exch="XLON" xdte="2013-11-20" nett/GBX="3.53"
$

👑 AUTHOR

Written by Sebastian Freundt <freundt@fresse.org>

🐛 REPORTING BUGS

Report bugs to: https://github.com/hroptatyr/dateutils/issues

(found a bug? tell the maintainers, don't just suffer in silence bestie 😭)

🦋 SEE ALSO

The full documentation for datesort is maintained as a Texinfo manual. If the info and datesort programs are properly installed at your site, the command

info (dateutils)datesort

should give you access to the complete manual.

and that's the whole page, bestie — every flag, every spec, every roman numeral, no notes. go forth and sort chronologically, you absolute main character 💅✨

this was dateutils version 0.4.11, dated January 2024 — mwah, xoxo 🎀

📦 where this page comes from