ubuntu-distro-info

[Snowhog]

There's an OPTION for this command: --date=DATE

But the Help doesn't prescribe how you provide DATE. There are no examples.

[jlittle]

It has to be YYYY-MM-DD, except that leading zeros may be omitted.

In case anyone wants to know why I say that...

$ apt-file find ubuntu-distro-info
distro-info: /usr/bin/ubuntu-distro-info  
distro-info: /usr/share/man/man1/ubuntu-distro-info.1.gz
$ apt-get source distro-info
....
$ cd distro-info-1.0

I saw that it's a C programme, so I looked for main and found it in distro-info-util.c, and in its option processing:

        case 'D':
            ...
            i = sscanf(optarg, "%u-%u-%u", &date->year, &date->month, &date->day);

so it has to be year-month-day, all numbers. At another point I found it subtracts 1900 from the year, so the year must include the century. If you leave it out, the year is in the first century CE and says its data is "outdated".

A weird consequence of that sscanf format is that month and day don't need leading zeros, so 2022-1-1 is accepted.

[Snowhog]

Thank you!