bug#80632: possible issue with date

tag 80632 notabug
close 80632
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On 17/03/2026 19:40, Hayek, Khalil (he, him | il, lui) wrote:
> UNCLASSIFIED - NON CLASSIFIÉ
> 
> Good day,
> 
> I noticed this behaviour of the "date" command today, and perhaps it is a bug, or it's by design.
> 
> Running date -date="-5 days 4 hours" produces the date minus 5 days from now plus 4 hours, whereas the intent is more likely to be "-5 days and 4 hours". I tried it with other numbers of days and hours and observed the same behaviour. Running date -date="-5 days -4 hours" produces the expected time.

That _is_ a bit of a gotcha,
but I don't think we can change it at this stage
as existing scripts may be depending on current behavior.

closing this for now.

thank you,
Padraig