date: bad conversion

[Conor P. Cahill]

In article <452 at abel.UUCP>, jma at abel.UUCP (Jeff Abrahamson) writes:
> 
> 	I have been having news articles come in and put in *files*
> with bad dates.  That is, I can do an "ls -l nnnn" and find out how long
> they've been here, but if I try to do a "touch nnnn", I get the
> message "date: bad conversion".  This is the file!  (Needless to say,
> I have some expire problems, too.)

The problem with touch is that the first argument, if numeric, is interpreted
to be the date/time to set the file to.  In your case you want to set a numeric
file to the current date.  This can be accomplished by the following:

	touch ./nnnn



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