Re: Help with Grep and date

[Matthew Woehlke]

omega_grey wrote:
> Don't I feel like a dork. No wonder why I couldn't find anything. Awk you
> say. Will look into it but someone else has suggested I use PERL for this.
> Sigh.

Perl would probably work also. grep is for finding strings, it doesn't 
manipulate them. sed/awk do both, sed is mostly for string/regex 
replacements, awk is more of a programming language (and also tends to 
work more with fields, where sed is more line-based). Perl is a flat-out 
programming language, though somewhat similar to awk in that it has easy 
input handling (compared to e.g. C/C++).

Hmm... if you have *just* the string "12/01/08" (meaning Jan 12), you 
can convert it with 'date' like:
echo "12/01/08" | sed 's,([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+),\2/\1/\3,' | xargs 
-n 1 date '+%Y-%m-%d' -d

...which has the advantage of understanding the input as an actual date. 
Replace the 'echo' with anything generating "#/#/#" dates, one per line. 
You should be able to do something similar with times. ('date -d' might 
be locale-dependent, or I might be wrong about your month/day order; if 
so, omit the sed part of the pipe.)

--
Matthew
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