Printing time in "at" format?

[Roy Smith]

I need to talk to an API which requires (for reasons totally beyond my
comprehension), time specified in "at" format, i.e. the format
accepted by the unix "at" command. This allows you to do such bizarre
things as use "teatime" to indicate 4:00 PM. The best I can find for
a specification is http://tinyurl.com/d5vddoa.

Before I dive into this too far, has anybody already written some code
which formats times like that?

 

[Tim Chase]

I need to talk to an API which requires (for reasons totally beyond my
comprehension), time specified in "at" format, i.e. the format
accepted by the unix "at" command. This allows you to do such bizarre
things as use "teatime" to indicate 4:00 PM. The best I can find for
a specification is http://tinyurl.com/d5vddoa.

Before I dive into this too far, has anybody already written some code
which formats times like that?

Your statement can be ambiguously parsed as "I need to merely
*generate* time specifications that 'at' can parse", or it can be
parsed as "I need to generate *and consume* time specifications the
same way as 'at' does"

If it's the former, it's pretty easy--'at' accepts a wide variety of
formats.

If it's the latter, I've got a doc in

/usr/share/doc/at/timespec

on my Debian machine, which seems to be googleable, but here's one
copy of it

http://fts.ifac.cnr.it/cgi-bin/dwww/usr/share/doc/at/timespec

I don't have a parser already, but that should get you a jump start
on what (at least Debian's) 'at' parses, and might tie nicely with
pyparsing.

-tkc

 

[Roy Smith]

Your statement can be ambiguously parsed as "I need to merely
*generate* time specifications that 'at' can parse", or it can be
parsed as "I need to generate *and consume* time specifications the
same way as 'at' does"

If it's the former, it's pretty easy--'at' accepts a wide variety of
formats.

Fortunately, it's the former.

Since posting my original query, I have discovered by experimentation that the API also accepts a string of digits as a unix timestamp, so this turns out to be trivial.

 

[Hans Mulder]

I need to talk to an API which requires (for reasons totally beyond my
comprehension), time specified in "at" format, i.e. the format
accepted by the unix "at" command. This allows you to do such bizarre
things as use "teatime" to indicate 4:00 PM. The best I can find for
a specification is http://tinyurl.com/d5vddoa.

Before I dive into this too far, has anybody already written some code
which formats times like that?

On my machine x.strftime("%H:%m %d.%m.%Y") formats datetime objects
in a format that at(1) understands:

$ > at -f my_job '12:11 21.11.2012'
at: trying to travel back in time


Hope this helps,

-- HansM