Converting date in a shell script

[Timothy P. Jackson]

I am developing a shell script that needs to accept multiple date formats and be able to convert them into the long date format.

Example:

10/29/07 ---> 29 October 2007
10-29-2007 ---> 29 October 2007
10.29.07 ---> 29 October 2007

etc.....

I need this so that I can grep out information from the certian log files. Because this is going to be run by normal users I am not sure if I can get them to enter the date the same time, every time.

Does any one have suggestions or recommendations on how to do this?

Thanks,
Tim

[blah2blah · Accepted solution]

use Clay Stephenson's 'caljd' date manipulation utility!

You can download it from Merijn's website:

http://mirrors.develooper.com/hpux/

[Timothy P. Jackson]

Thanks,

I down loaded it but I am have some diffulty with the syntax. Is there a "help" with Clay's utility?


Tim

[blah2blah]

either -u or -? will generate a usage message

[Timothy P. Jackson]

Ok, I got the date to convert to a Julian Date, but now I need to convert it back a specific format of.....

Mon Oct 29 ... ... ...

this would be the same format that the "date" command would give.

Maybe there is an easier way to do this. I need to get all the entries out of the br_log file for the past 3 months, or from any give date forward.

[blah2blah]

just replying to return to top of queue.

maybe someone familiar with clay's date tool can provide further examples in how to do this

[Timothy P. Jackson]

Thanks for following up on this. Clay's date converter utility works great. I spent some time with his examples and found what I needed. I also found that to create a script to pull this information out of the br_log file was going to take a lot longer than it was worth.

So I imported the br_log file into Excell and striped out the data that I didn't want. This should make management happy.

Thanks again!

Tim

[Timothy P. Jackson]

See above reply

[A. Clay Stephenson]

This is really not a task for caljd.sh (or caljd.pl); your problem is tailor-made for the ParseDate function of the Perl Date::Manip module. Date::Manip is available from any CPAN site. ParseDate can recognize many different input formats and convert it to YYYYMMDDHH:MM:SS. Converting to another format is quite simple from that output.

[Wim Rombauts]

Although Clay's tool may be magnificent, I still wonder what is wrong with the date command :
date +"%d %B %E" return (TMHO) exactly what you look for.

[Timothy P. Jackson]

Thanks for the information Clay.

When I have some more time I will persue this option. For now Excel will have to job. It is kind of funny that there has not been a utility to sort this information out already created.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

The thought of a poor defenseless UNIX box being forced to use Excel is more than my heart can bear. It took me all of about 3 minutes to throw together this Perl sample.

Since you changed your requirements from the 1st example to the 2nd example, I decided to output 2 lines for each input argument.

date.pl "10/29/07" "10-29-2007" "10.29.07" "Oct 10, 2007"

should all be handled with ease. You will need to install the Date::Manip module and that will take you about 4 minutes to download and install from www.perl.org/CPAN.

You should be able to take this and run with it even if you make your Perl script a blackbox that is called by a shell script.

[Timothy P. Jackson]

Thanks Clay, this is awesome!

I too was thinking the same thing as I imported the br_log file into Excel. Its a sad day when I have to use MS to do my work for me.

Thanks again for all your help.



Tim