
  date [-var variable] [-seconds] [-reftime seconds]

  Return the date and place it into (variable).

  Default: print to window

* by itself, just echoes the date & time

* to set a variable with the date, add -var name, where 'name' is the
  name of your variable.  by default, this is a human readable date,
  eg Wed Mar 12 08:30:11 2008

* to calculate time differences, add the -seconds flag, and the value
  will be in seconds since 1970 Jan 01 00:00:00.  NOTE: There is a bug
  in that the variable is represented as a float, and the value is now
  > 1.2e9 seconds.  The difference is thus not very accurate.  To get
  around this, use the -reftime feature to report the seconds since a
  more recent date.  A value of something like 1205340000 works at the
  moment.

examples:

  dvo: date
  Wed Mar 12 08:30:11 2008

  dvo: date -var foo -seconds
  dvo: echo $foo
  1205346664

  dvo: date -var foo -seconds -reftime 1205340000
  dvo: echo $foo
  6700
  dvo: date -var bar -seconds -reftime 1205340000
  dvo: echo $bar
  6708
  dvo: echo {$bar - $foo}
  8
