On 2011-09-12, wrote:
On 12 Sep 2011 01:26:14 GMT, "DoN. Nichols"
wrote:

On 2011-09-11, David Billington wrote:

I wasn't born when JFK got shot by about a year but I can remember

[ ... ]

As a side question what is the background to the US date system of
month/day/year as it seems nonsensical to me, I lived with it for 12
years when in the US, but ascending or descending precedence make
sense but mixed precedence seems bizarre.

I have to agree, and I have to live with it all the time.
(Except when *I* define the format. I tend to prefer YYYY-MM-DD so files
so marked will sort in chronological order. (And the '-' because on
unix, '/' is the subdirectory delimiter.

[ ... ]

In Canada d/m/y is becoming the standard.


Which *still* does not sort properly.

BTW I also prefer the GB/European way of naming particularly
large numbers (e.g. "billion" is one million million (10^12), not
one thousand million (10^9), and "trillion" is one billion
million (10^18), not 10^12.

But I am more likely to use the exponential notation shown
above anyway, as again there is no chance for confusion.

And generally, when I do use the "/ /" format, I will make the
month the three-letter abbreviation, and use the four-digit year so
there should be no doubt what I mean.

And for generating filenames, I've got a script which I've
called "ddate" which produces output of the format:

.2011-09-11

and I usually use it as follows:

mv filename filename`ddate`

so "filename" becomes "filename.2011-09-11" (or whatever is the current
date).

(In case you do not know unix, two things should be explained
about the above:

1 "mv" not only can be used to move a file from one directory to
another, but also renames it (so there is no need for a separate
rename command).

2) Enclosing a command (e.g. "ddate") in backquotes "`", accent
grave replaces its location in the command line with the output
from running that command.

Enjoy,
DoN.

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