Date arithmetic in Unix shell scripts

Question

I need to do date arithmetic in Unix shell scripts that I use to control the execution of third party programs.

I\'m using a function to increment a day and another

Answer 1

If you want to continue with awk, then the mktime and strftime functions are useful:

BEGIN { dateinit }
      { newdate=daysadd(OldDate,DaysToAdd)}

 # daynum: convert DD-MON-YYYY to day count
 #-----------------------------------------
function daynum(date,  d,m,y,i,n)
{
     y=substr(date,8,4)
     m=gmonths[toupper(substr(date,4,3))]
     d=substr(date,1,2)
     return mktime(y" "m" "d" 12 00 00")
}

 #numday: convert day count to DD-MON-YYYY
 #-------------------------------------------
function numday(n,  y,m,d)
{
    m=toupper(substr(strftime("%B",n),1,3))
    return strftime("%d-"m"-%Y",n)
}

 # daysadd: add (or subtract) days from date (DD-MON-YYYY), return new date (DD-MON-YYYY)
 #------------------------------------------
function daysadd(date, days)
{
    return numday(daynum(date)+(days*86400))
}

 #init variables for date calcs
 #-----------------------------------------
function dateinit(   x,y,z)
{
     # Stuff for date calcs
     split("JAN:1,FEB:2,MAR:3,APR:4,MAY:5,JUN:6,JUL:7,AUG:8,SEP:9,OCT:10,NOV:11,DEC:12", z)
     for (x in z)
     {
        split(z[x],y,":")
        gmonths[y[1]]=y[2]
     }
}