(coreutils.info)Time of day items

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29.3 Time of day items
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A “time of day item” in date strings specifies the time on a given day.
Here are some examples, all of which represent the same time:

     20:02:00.000000
     20:02
     8:02pm
     20:02-0500      # In EST (U.S. Eastern Standard Time).

   More generally, the time of day may be given as ‘HOUR:MINUTE:SECOND’,
where HOUR is a number between 0 and 23, MINUTE is a number between 0
and 59, and SECOND is a number between 0 and 59 possibly followed by ‘.’
or ‘,’ and a fraction containing one or more digits.  Alternatively,
‘:SECOND’ can be omitted, in which case it is taken to be zero.  On the
rare hosts that support leap seconds, SECOND may be 60.

   If the time is followed by ‘am’ or ‘pm’ (or ‘a.m.’ or ‘p.m.’), HOUR
is restricted to run from 1 to 12, and ‘:MINUTE’ may be omitted (taken
to be zero).  ‘am’ indicates the first half of the day, ‘pm’ indicates
the second half of the day.  In this notation, 12 is the predecessor of
1: midnight is ‘12am’ while noon is ‘12pm’.  (This is the zero-oriented
interpretation of ‘12am’ and ‘12pm’, as opposed to the old tradition
derived from Latin which uses ‘12m’ for noon and ‘12pm’ for midnight.)

   The time may alternatively be followed by a time zone correction,
expressed as ‘SHHMM’, where S is ‘+’ or ‘-’, HH is a number of zone
hours and MM is a number of zone minutes.  The zone minutes term, MM,
may be omitted, in which case the one- or two-digit correction is
interpreted as a number of hours.  You can also separate HH from MM with
a colon.  When a time zone correction is given this way, it forces
interpretation of the time relative to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC),
overriding any previous specification for the time zone or the local
time zone.  For example, ‘+0530’ and ‘+05:30’ both stand for the time
zone 5.5 hours ahead of UTC (e.g., India).  This is the best way to
specify a time zone correction by fractional parts of an hour.  The
maximum zone correction is 24 hours.

   Either ‘am’/‘pm’ or a time zone correction may be specified, but not
both.