Removing leading zeros from date output

As per the GNU date manpage:

   By default, date  pads  numeric  fields  with  zeroes.   The  following
   optional flags may follow '%':

   -      (hyphen) do not pad the field

Therefore you can do

alias date="date '+%Y.%-m.%-d.%-H.%-M.%-S'"

and receive

2013.6.14.3.19.31

Feels silly, but since this question is tagged with /sed, here is a way to do this with sed, as you had mentioned :)

alias date='date +"%Y.%m.%d.%H.%M.%S" | sed "s/^0*//g; s/\.0*/./g"'

Related