Locale independence about bashstyle

[stuartpb]

Also, any time you record a date, you should do it as date -uIns, which saves it in human-readable ISO format with nanosecond precision and explicitly no timezone (date -Ins will record the local time with its offset to UTC, but any careful environment should be set for +0000 anyway). date %s is also useful, for recording the UTC Epoch time in seconds.

(If you only need to record the date to a lesser accuracy, you can use date -uIseconds, or date -Idate to just record the local date.)