
    Spurred by the recent discussion in net.unix-wizards that produced
    a suggestion on how to set the date over the network, but relied
    upon facilities of the Bell System V date command, I submit for
    your perusal, and possible use, the following old program of mine
    that performs a similar function.  (Note: this is NOT one of the
    system 5 rewrites!)

    This is a sh archive, you should remove the mail header, and run
    sh on the body to extract 3 files.

    READ_ME	(that you are now reading)
    fdate.1	A manual page
    fdate.c	The source

    On System V systems, this should be compiled as

	    cc -O -o fdate -DSysV fdate.c

    4.*bsd systems and version 7 should use

	    cc -O -o fdate fdate.c

    Other systems can take pot luck!		Sorry.

    To use it to get the date in the form required as the arg of the
    date(1) command, you should use:

		date "`fdate %02y%02m%02d%02H%02M.%02S`"

    I hope that there is someone out there who might find this useful,
    otherwise I just wasted quite a lot of network time ...

    Robert Elz.				decvax!mulga!kre


