[BusyBox] (patch) rdate - show time difference

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Mon May 2 10:09:52 UTC 2005


On Monday 02 May 2005 06:29 am, walter harms wrote:
> hi rob,
> hi list
>
> i do not know the traditional rdate command (normaly i use netdate and
> that shows the diff).

The diff could also be worked out from:
rdate -p clock.psu.edu && date

A simple script could probably do what you wanted without modifying rdate at 
all, in fact.  Since you only one one second granularity, something vaguely 
like:

newdate=`rdate -p clock.psu.edu`
olddate=`date +$format`
date -s $newdate +$format
offset=$[`date -d $newdate +$format` - `date -d $olddate +$format`]

Presumably it should run fast enough to avoid any major loss of accuracy.  
(And if you're worried that the program might get interrupted and something 
higher priority run between fetching and setting the date; the same is true 
of the C program too.  Smaller window.  You could run date once just before 
rdate to bring it into cache if you care about that, but again, with 1 second 
granularity...)

Rob



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