Don't recall where I got it, but I've attached the `date´ binary to this post - hopefully it survives without any CRLF translations mucking it up.

Assign the string returned by the date command (encolse in back-ticks) to a variable and parse out the parts (or make repeated calls with different format parameters to get the various parts). The man page for date is here.

In general, deb-packages (they're 2 tar.gz files ar'ed together) can be found via the Debian homepage, http://www.debian.org

/Michael