I've just looked at this question. The first answer states how to get a future date directly from the date command. Why couldn't you just use text manipulation to increment the date? Basically:date | # increment the time string by some amount hereI'm not familiar with awk or sed or I'd give a better example.Edit: so basically there is no technical reason? Just portability and the fact that it's harder than it looks?
If you want to get a future date, why can't you just get the current date and use sed/awk/etc?
date
Basically, you can, but is not portable enough, can fail and it is more effort at the end of the day.Let say I want to use awk to increment the minutes by 3. (I will ignore that if it's greater than 59 I have to reset to 00 for now):$ dateMon Sep 16 22:52:42 AST 2013$ date | awk -F: '{printf $1 : ; printf $2+3 : ; print $3}'Mon Sep 16 22:55:43 AST 2013Nice there. But now I have to develop a function that whenever minutes reach 59 it resets to 00. Not nice anymore. Hence is preferred natural ways to increment the time instead of parsing the text.