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(cvsbook.info)Acceptable Date Formats

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Acceptable Date Formats
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CVS accepts a wide range of syntaxes to specify dates.  You'll never go
wrong if you use ISO 8601 format (that is, the International Standards
Organization standard #8601, see also
www.saqqara.demon.co.uk/datefmt.htm), which is the format used in the
preceding examples.  You can also use Internet email dates as described
in RFC 822 and RFC 1123 (see www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/).  Finally, you can
use certain unambiguous English constructs to specify dates relative to
the current date.

You will probably never need all of the formats available, but here are
some more examples to give you an idea of what CVS accepts:

     floss$ cvs update -D "19 Apr 1999"
     floss$ cvs update -D "19 Apr 1999 20:05"
     floss$ cvs update -D "19/04/1999"
     floss$ cvs update -D "3 days ago"
     floss$ cvs update -D "5 years ago"
     floss$ cvs update -D "19 Apr 1999 23:59:59 GMT"
     floss$ cvs update -D "19 Apr"

The double quotes around the dates are there to ensure that the Unix
shell treats the date as one argument even if it contains spaces.  The
quotes will do no harm if the date doesn't contain spaces, so it's
probably best to always use them.