May 28, 2026
Time tool or name theft?
Biff is a command line datetime Swiss army knife
A handy time tool drops, and the comments instantly turn into a nostalgia roast
TLDR: Biff is a new command-line tool built to make date and time tasks much easier, from conversions to scheduling. The community reaction was split between genuine interest and hilarious old-timer jokes, with many readers insisting “Biff” already belongs to a vintage mail alert program.
A new tool called Biff has arrived promising to be the pocket knife of date and time commands: it can show the current time, convert time zones, add “one week and 12 hours ago,” round timestamps, scan log files, and even generate oddly specific future dates like the second Tuesday of every month. In plain English: it’s for people who want their computer to stop acting weird about calendars, clocks, and time zones.
But the real entertainment wasn’t the feature list — it was the comment section having an identity crisis over the name. Several readers immediately dragged the project into a delightful retro detour, pointing out that “biff” used to mean a totally different old-school Unix mail notification tool. One of the biggest laughs came from a commenter flatly declaring, “No, Biff informs the system whether you want to be notified when mail arrives.” Translation: this shiny new Biff may be useful, but to some veterans, the name is already taken.
Then came the comedy gold. A user mocked the example output with “Ahh, the month of M05,” clowning on Biff’s less-than-lovely fallback formatting when language settings aren’t configured. Others were more supportive, comparing it to rivals like dateutils and noting it comes from the same creator behind jiff, which earned instant trust from fans. So the vibe is clear: half the crowd is intrigued, half is squinting at the branding, and everyone is making jokes about time itself — which, honestly, feels on brand.
Key Points
- •Biff is a command-line datetime tool that supports arithmetic, parsing, formatting, timezone conversion, and sequence generation.
- •The project is dual-licensed under MIT or the UNLICENSE and provides documentation through a user guide and command help.
- •The article shows Biff formatting time in multiple standards and custom formats, including RFC 3339, RFC 9557, and locale-based output.
- •Examples demonstrate adding durations, calculating spans since past dates, rounding times and spans, and converting times across time zones.
- •Biff can be used in shell pipelines to retag and reformat timestamps in log files and to generate recurring date sequences such as weekdays or monthly patterns.