On a localized box, I had to run "unset LANG" first, because otherwise date doesn't seem to understand its own output.
Thank you! Was banging my head against the wall on RHEL6's tomcat. Went on Hacker News to stop thinking about it for a few minutes. Son of a bitch, the solution was right on the front page.
Where were you 11 hours ago when we rebooted all of our cassandra and mysql machines? :-)
Doesn't work for everyone (Didn't work with our java processes on RHEL 6.2)