date of 7 days ago

[vodhner at cox.net]

Dan Lund wrote:
> Whats a nice quick way to find out what the
> date was 7 days ago?
> ...
>    date --date='7 days ago'

Note that only Gnu "date" (standard in Linux) can do this.
In non-Gnu environments you have to get your shoes dirty to do this correctly.

I just yesterday discovered the $SECONDS variable in ksh and bash.  It lets you measure elapsed time in a shell script without spawning separate processes -- very nice.