Okay so I'm not really a newbie, but this bugs the crap out of me (rant on).

Every so often I need to change the system time. I run "man date" and always find the "date -s" command, but for who knows how long, the manual page has *never* listed the format of the input string required to set the date. I eventually remember to run "info date" and get to a usable example. That leaves me with

1) why doesn't the man page specify this format
2) why doesn't the man page even mention that you can do things like

date --set='+2 minutes'

Okay, rant off. Oh, and any of you Unix-heads out there know why things are this way in a relatively mundane manual page?
--
Quentin

The manpage for GNU date seems straightforward enough:

DATE(1)                          User Commands                         DATE(1)



NAME
       date - print or set the system date and time

SYNOPSIS
       date [OPTION]... [+FORMAT]
       date [-u|--utc|--universal] [MMDDhhmm[[CC]YY][.ss]]

DESCRIPTION
       Display the current time in the given FORMAT, or set the system date.

...