On 5/13/06, Bruno Buys <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I am working on a script that needs to compute days. It needs to know how many days have gone since some given date. for example, if I run it today, it will need to know how many days have passed since, say, Feb, 02, 2006. And add the corresponding number to a variable. I am looking at the man page for 'date', but it doesn't seem to help much. Also, apt-cache search won't do better. Is there any nice tool to operate dates at the console? thanks!
Since you're doing this in a script, it presumably doesn't need to be done in a single line. I'd start with date -d "Feb 2, 2006" +"%s" to get the number of seconds since the epoch for midnight on the date specified. Then I'd do date +"%s" to get the same for the current time. Subtract those, and you get the number of seconds since Feb 2, 2006. There are 86400 seconds in a day. Divide, throw out the remainder, and you've got the number of days since Feb 2, 2006. If you *must* have a one-liner: expr \( `date +"%s"` - `date -d "Feb 2, 2006" +"%s"` \) / 86400 -- Michael A. Marsh http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~mmarsh http://mamarsh.blogspot.com
