If you're looking for a general solution to that specific type of problem, then dateutils¹ is really useful. It deals with conversions, durations, matching, re

If you're looking for a general solution to that specific type of problem, then dateutils¹ is really useful. It deals with conversions, durations, matching, repeats, etc. It also has a clear and well defined date input format, and being a collection of command line tools it is easy to mangle it in to other tools. ¹ http://www.fresse.org/dateutils http://www.fresse.org/dateutils