internal date value

Folks:

>From what I gather, Oracle stores dates as the number of elapsed days since
Jan 1, 1968. When I query a column of type 'DATE', it returns me the default format, dd-mon-yy. I know I can use to_char(date_col,'YYYYMMDD') etc... to define many output formats.

What can I do to get the raw internal value of the date? i.e. today is 13172.

Thanks.

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Author: Droogendyk, Harry
  INET: Harry.Droogendyk_at_cibc.com

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