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RunAsDate – Run a program with the specified date/time (2019)

nirsoft.net

31–40 of 64 posts

Re: RunAsDate – Run a program with the specified date/time (2019)

#35
post #9
post #6

Is there an equivalent tool for *nix OSes?

faketime '2008-12-24 01:15:43' /bin/date

I like differences between OS philosophies. It allows us to see how some things can be done way simpler and highlights strengths and weaknesses of different ideas.

Not being a windows guy for a long time, I was impressed that windows users were happy when chrome implemented the "print to pdf" feature, I said "CUPS let me print to ps or pdf a decade ago". Another moment like that was when I showed the 'time' command to a student as a crude benchmark for algorithms and also using LD_PRELOAD to easily show that his code had leaks, then complemented it with valgrind and leak sanitizer.

Leak sanitizer is multi-platform, valgrind can be replaced by drmemory and, of course, windows has many advantages that made it earn the desktop but, at the time, nothing like that was close on windows as a quick apt-get.

A trick I usually do these days is when someone argues about developing something new. I think about a somewhat similar package and "apt-get build-dep" and "apt-get source" it. In a matter of minutes I have dependencies for a package, its source code, compile and install it. People always get impressed at how easy it can be.

Re: RunAsDate – Run a program with the specified date/time (2019)

#36
post #34
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

faketime '2008-12-24 01:15:43' /bin/date

Can it also slow down the clock?

Indeed, you can: faketime -f '+2y x0.1' /bin/bash -c 'date; while true; do echo $SECONDS ; sleep 1 ; done'

Re: RunAsDate – Run a program with the specified date/time (2019)

#37
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Testing. Maybe a bug only appears around midnight, or near Easter. This makes that easier to reproduce.

Gimme gimme gimme? ;)

Yep! You got my reference.

For all others, see [1] and [2] .

[1]: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15747313

Re: RunAsDate – Run a program with the specified date/time (2019)

#39
post #28

I would like to take this opportunity to note that all NirSoft tools are closed source. Its nice that "Nir" or whoever has made them freely available, but when the day comes that they are not updated anymore, because of lack of interest, or life changes or whatever, all the effort that went into making them is lost to history. No one will be able to fork the project, or continue on with the work, as the source code w…

It is "Nir" or whoever's work and choice about what license to use.

If you wrote a book and some of your readers demanded that you let them write the sequels, you might be quite annoyed.

Creators have rights and it is respectful and just to honor their choices.

Maybe "Nir" or whoever will release the tools under an open source license upon retirement or something, but that is up to them.

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