Graphite uses an at-style time specification similar to that used by RRDTool. The specification is called ``at-style'' after the Unix command at(1) that has moderately complex ways to specify time to run your job at a certain date and time. The at-style specification consists of two parts: the TIME REFERENCE specification and the TIME OFFSET specification.
The time reference specification is used, well, to establish a reference moment in time (to which the time offset is then applied to). When present, it should come first, when omitted, it defaults to now. On its own part, time reference consists of a time-of-day reference (which should come first, if present) and a day reference.
The time-of-day can be specified as HH:MM, HH.MM, or just HH. You can suffix it with am or pm or use 24-hours clock. Some special times of day are understood as well, including midnight (00:00), noon (12:00) and British teatime (16:00).
The day can be specified as month-name day-of-the-month and optional a 2- or 4-digit year number (e.g. March 8 1999). Alternatively, you can use day-of-week-name (e.g. Monday), or one of the words: yesterday, today, tomorrow. You can also specify the day as a full date in several numerical formats, including MM/DD/[YY]YY, DD.MM.[YY]YY, or YYYYMMDD.
NOTE1: this is different from the original at(1) behavior, where a single-number date is interpreted as MMDD[YY]YY.
NOTE2: if you specify the day in this way, the time-of-day is REQUIRED as well.
Finally, you can use the words now, start, or end as your time reference. Now refers to the current moment (and is also the default time reference). Start (end) can be used to specify a time relative to the start (end) time for those tools that use these categories.
Month and day of the week names can be used in their naturally abbreviated form (e.g., Dec for December, Sun for Sunday, etc.). The words now, start, end can be abbreviated as n, s, e.
The time offset specification is used to add/subtract certain time intervals to/from the time reference moment. It consists of a sign (+ or -) and an amount. The following time units can be used to specify the amount: years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, or seconds. These units can be used in singular or plural form, and abbreviated naturally or to a single letter (e.g. +3days, -1wk, -3y). Several time units can be combined (e.g., -5mon1w2d) or concatenated (e.g., -5h45min = -5h-45min = -6h+15min = -7h+1h30m-15min, etc.)
NOTE3: If you specify time offset in days, weeks, months, or years, you will end with the time offset that may vary depending on your time reference, because all those time units have no single well defined time interval value (1 year contains either 365 or 366 days, 1 month is 28 to 31 days long, and even 1 day may be not equal to 24 hours twice a year, when DST-related clock adjustments take place). To cope with this, when you use days, weeks, months, or years as your time offset units your time reference date is adjusted accordingly without too much further effort to ensure anything about it (in the hope that mktime(3) will take care of this later). This may lead to some surprising (or even invalid!) results, e.g. 'May 31 -1month' = 'Apr 31' (meaningless) = 'May 1' (after mktime(3) normalization); in the EET timezone '3:30am Mar 29 1999 -1 day' yields '3:30am Mar 28 1999' (Sunday) which is an invalid time/date combination (because of 3am -> 4am DST forward clock adjustment, see the below example).
In contrast, hours, minutes, and seconds are well defined time intervals, and these are guaranteed to always produce time offsets exactly as specified (e.g. for EET timezone, '8:00 Mar 27 1999 +2 days' = '8:00 Mar 29 1999', but since there is 1-hour DST forward clock adjustment that occurs around 3:00 Mar 28 1999, the actual time interval between 8:00 Mar 27 1999 and 8:00 Mar 29 1999 equals 47 hours; on the other hand, '8:00 Mar 27 1999 +48 hours' = '9:00 Mar 29 1999', as expected)
NOTE4: The single-letter abbreviation for both months and minutes is m. To disambiguate them, the parser tries to read your mind :) by applying the following two heuristics:
Final NOTES: Time specification is case-insensitive. Whitespace can be inserted freely or omitted altogether. There are, however, cases when whitespace is required (e.g., 'midnight Thu'). In this case you should either quote the whole phrase to prevent it from being taken apart by your shell or use '_' (underscore) or ',' (comma) which also count as whitespace (e.g., midnight_Thu or midnight,Thu).
Oct 12 -- October 12 this year
-1month or -1m -- current time of day, only a month before (may yield surprises, see NOTE3 above).
noon yesterday -3hours -- yesterday morning; can also be specified as 9am-1day.
23:59 31.12.1999 -- 1 minute to the year 2000.
12/31/99 11:59pm -- 1 minute to the year 2000 for imperialists.
12am 01/01/01 -- start of the new millennium
end-3weeks or e-3w -- 3 weeks before end time (may be used as start time specification).
start+6hours or s+6h -- 6 hours after start time (may be used as end time specification).
931225537 -- 18:45 July 5th, 1999 (yes, seconds since 1970 are valid as well).
19970703 12:45 -- 12:45 July 3th, 1997 (my favorite, and its even got an ISO number (8601)).