Passing date on shell format

[JOJ0]

When correcting dates, what's the best format to submit. I seems like yyyy-mm-dd is not recognized:

beet mod added="2009-09-01 0" enforcers 3 format:flac
Modifying 6 items.
Various - Enforcers, Volume 3 - 01 - What Would We Do (1993/GB)  [RIVET 1242] f:FLAC a:23-04/MusicBrainz |Jungle, Drum And Bass
  added: 2023-04-14 09:01:13 -> 1970-01-01 01:00:00

I need to trick it with passing a time as well

beet mod added="2009-09-01 0:0:0" enforcers 3 format:flac
Modifying 6 items.
Various - Enforcers, Volume 3 - 01 - What Would We Do (1993/GB)  [RIVET 1242] f:FLAC a:23-04/MusicBrainz |Jungle, Drum And Bass
  added: 2023-04-14 09:01:13 -> 2009-09-01 00:00:00

What's the best way to pass a date on the shell?

[arsaboo]

You need to pass the date in epoch format. beet modify added=1681648018 album:"Enforcers 3" works. May be another operation to convert the date to epoch format would do the trick.

[JOJ0]

? I dont see why this is easier than passing as

"2009-09-01 0:0:0"

? :-)

[arsaboo]

Not easy for sure. I did not know we could just use "2009-09-01 0:0:0"...learned something new :)

[sampsyo]

Hi! While I know linking to the source code is an indication that things could be documented better, here we go. The dates get parsed here:

beets/beets/library.py

Lines 159 to 160 in d05c34e

	time.strptime(string,
	beets.config['time_format'].as_str())

So the format used to parse dates is actually configurable. Here's the default:

beets/beets/config_default.yaml

Line 108 in d05c34e

time_format: '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'

So if you're interested in dropping the time part, you might consider changing that config option.