Faking Date for Specific Shell Session in Linux

linuxshelltimeunixunix-shell

I'm certainly trying to achieve something weird here, but I want to fake the date locally for a shell session on GNU/Linux.
I need to black-box test how a program behaves at different dates, and modifying the system-wide date can have unwanted side effects (cron jobs, messed up logs, etc).

Any ideas ?

Best Answer

You can just use executable faketime (from ubuntu repositories sudo apt-get install faketime) by:

faketime -f "-15d" date

Or even fake time in whole shell by

faketime -f "-15d" bash -l

Related Solutions

linux – How to Hide Output of a Shell Application

You can redirect the output of any program so that it won't be seen.

$ program > /dev/null

This will redirect the standard output - you'll still see any errors

$ program &> /dev/null

This will redirect all output, including errors.

Cron – Change the shell for cron job

Why it doesn't Work:
The reason that it doesn't work is that su requires that you run the command from a terminal, and cron does not provide a terminal.

Simple way to do it is using Vixie Cron:
If you didn't mind using Vixie Cron I think the simplest thing to do would be to put the script in for that user by running the following as that user:

crontab -e

Then use 0 0 * * 0 as the time.

If you want to use Anacron as a User:
Anacron is helpful if you want to make sure the job doesn't get missed if the machine was off. To run as different user, specify a different anacron tab file and spool dir, put the following in the system cron to run as the specified user, anacron -t /home/foo/etc/anacrontab -S /home/foo/var/spool/ and then edit that tab file to run the script.

There is also a mini-howto, but this looks more complicated.

You will have to test these though to verify. Lastly, remember this for future testing run-parts --test /etc/cron.weekly

Best Answer

Related Solutions

linux – How to Hide Output of a Shell Application

Cron – Change the shell for cron job

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