Recently I found an elegant way to use simple scripting to calculate & output a date which is not "now".
It utilizes the linux date command, a program which is much more versatile than is generally known.
$ date +%s can be used to output the current date in seconds.
This outputs a number like: 1391191922 representing the current time in seconds.
This number can be manipulated to add or substract a certain amount of time (also in seconds).
My case was using a known number of minutes to calculate a time in the future.
I used a perlscript to do the calculations but you can use whatever you like.
The result is another number which can be fed to the date command like this:
$ date -d @1391662381
Or, from a file:
$ date -d @$(cat /home/books/datecompleted)
Thu Feb 6 05:53:01 CET 2014
$
/emgi
