HODIE(1)

👑 HODIE(1) — the User Manuals era ✨

okay bestie, sit down, hydrate, because we're about to talk about hodie — the manual page for the little program that prints today's date... in Latin 🏛️💖 yes, actually. and the time in Roman numerals. no, I'm not kidding. it's iconic, it's unhinged, it's giving "the ancients had a CLI and honestly? they ate."

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🌸 NAME 🌸

hodie — Print current date and time... in Latin 🦋

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

hodie [ OPTION ]...

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💫 DESCRIPTION 💫

so hodie prints out the current date using classic Latin, and on top of that it also prints it out and the time using Roman numerals. yes bestie, both. it's overachieving like that 💅

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -h, --help — prints a short help message with the syntax. your little "what do I even type" lifeline 🫶
• -v, --verbose — prints months and days (pridie, Kalends, Nones, Ides) in their full form instead of the abbreviations. ngl this is the standard mode of operation — it's just how she runs.
  • and if you do -v twice, or use -vv, or go full --extremely-verbose, you get the numerals fully declined where that applies — as in 'ante diem quintum Kalends Septembres'. that's the maxed-out, no-abbreviations, grammar-girlie setting 😭✨
• -n, --numerals — do not print anything in Latin, only the date and the time as Roman numerals. Latin-free zone, numerals only 💀
• -x, --force-numerals — prints both the verbose Latin and the date and time as Roman numerals. yes, both. greedy. obsessed.
• -c, --classic, --auc — prints the year the classic way, ab urbe condita, instead of the more modern anno domini. ancient-era main character energy 👑
• -a, --ante-diem — prints the date expressing the number of days to the next main day with the ante diem expression instead of the ablative case. grammar choices, we love them 🌸
• -d, --date — print out any date you want. this one has a rather special syntax: a keyword follows the -d flag and that keyword picks the input format. go read the DATE INPUT section below, fr fr 👇
• -r, --republican OFFSET — prints the date dated ab urbe tua condita with the offset counted in years as compared to the modern european kalendar (which originates with the hypothetical birth of christ). so hodie -r -753 would be equivalent with hodie -c 💫
• --version — prints out the version number of this release and exits. and it does this no matter whether other options appear on the command line or not — she does not care, she is leaving 😌

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🦋 DATE INPUT 🦋

after the -d or the --date option flags, the first item has to be one of these, bestie:

• verbose — in this case the year, month and day are given by following the verbose keyword with the flags -y, --year, -m, --month, -d, --day for year, month and date respectively 🌈
• ymd — after this flag the date comes in the format YYYY-MM-DD, where the numbers may be separated by any non-numeric character. anything non-numeric, she's flexible like that ✨
• dmy — with this flag the date is given as DD-MM-YYYY 💜
• mdy — with this flag the date is given as MM-DD-YYYY. restrictions on the characters that may replace the hyphen apply as above 👆

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📜 HISTORY 📜

the story began on the 10. of August, 2000 (a.d. VI Id. Iul., MM). our author had finished most of the assignment for a two-month summer job at Ericsson Eurolab Deutschland, Nuremberg, was idling around on the Internet, and stumbled over the dotcomma-challenges at <http://www.dotcomma.org> — where especially the Roman numeral challenge started the mind going 🔥

almost an hour of hacking, and there it was. another hour, and the language support was there. before the night was over, the man page was written and the layout of a decent Makefile was drawn out mentally. periodt. 💅

at the end of the next day, things were far enough along that the workings of RPM were actually worked out — a .rpm-package and a .src.rpm-package were constructed, promptly released on the home-page, announced on freshmeat, and uploaded to metalab (apps/misc :-). iconic behaviour, honestly 🎀

response was quick and plentiful. by now there are compilation reports from Linux, FreeBSD and SCO Unixware 7; there are a few compatibility issues to put aside, but it works surprisingly well ✨

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💀 RETURN VALUES 💀

hodie returns zero. always. if it doesn't, then something is really bad with the code. like, really bad 😭

for some really unreadable code, this means that hodie could be used as a strange replacement for true 🙈

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🍓 BUGS 🍓

it doesn't sanity check the input... telling hodie to display the roman form of the 99th of march gives a slightly jumbled output, which most definitely does not make sense. bestie. it is not going to catch you 💀

reports are more than welcome (e-mail below) 🫶

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🧚 AUTHOR 🧚

now, who would come up with such a thing? well — that's Mikael Johansson, a rather all-round geek from Stockholm. gravely interested in languages, in computers and in mathematics; a combination more dangerous than you might think 😌

e-mails to <mikael@johanssons.org> 💌

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

date(1) — the normie cousin, still valid, still slaying 💅

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okay that's the whole thing, love you, go print some dates in Latin 💖 and for the record: this was the Linux manual, dated AUGUST 2000 — ancient, historic, still eating. 🎀✨ bye bestie 🦋