RC Logr 20190406 181729

Saturday, 6 Apr, 2019

I often need to replace dates in the frontmatter of markdown files, in «RFC 3339» format for content in static site generator Hugo. A simple shell function using gnu date, sed, head and pbcopy puts the current timestamp on the clipboard easily. 👻

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function date3339() {
   echo "Putting RFC3339 on Clipboard for Frontmatter"
   gdate --rfc-3339=seconds | sed 's/ /T/' | head -c -1 | pbcopy >&1
   echo "Date in RFC 3339 format on clipboard. Paste away"
}

Here is how it works:

• Gnu date with the --rfc-3339 switch gives us a timestamp like 2019-04-06 18:38:19+09:00, is piped to…
• sed which replaces the space with a T, then that is piped to…
• head to remove the trailing newline, which is finally piped to pbcopy to put the result on the clipboard (MacOS only).

Then just paste it where you need it. By the way, the timestamp means “18:38:19 in the timezone +9 hours ahead of GMT”, or, Japan time.