In a unix shell, how to get yesterday's date into a variable?

Question

I\'ve got a shell script which does the following to store the current day\'s date in a variable \'dt\':

date \"+%a %d/%m/%Y\" | read dt
echo ${dt}


        

Answer 1

ksh93:

dt=${ printf "%(%a %d/%m/%Y)T" yesterday; }

or:

dt=$(printf "%(%a %d/%m/%Y)T" yesterday)

The first one runs in the same process, the second one in a subshell.

Answer 2

If you have Perl available (and your date doesn't have nice features like yesterday), you can use:

pax> date
Thu Aug 18 19:29:49 XYZ 2010

pax> dt=$(perl -e 'use POSIX;print strftime "%d/%m/%Y%",localtime time-86400;')

pax> echo $dt
17/08/2010

Answer 3

If you don't have a version of date that supports --yesterday and you don't want to use perl, you can use this handy ksh script of mine. By default, it returns yesterday's date, but you can feed it a number and it tells you the date that many days in the past. It starts to slow down a bit if you're looking far in the past. 100,000 days ago it was 1/30/1738, though my system took 28 seconds to figure that out.

    #! /bin/ksh -p

    t=`date +%j`
    ago=$1
    ago=${ago:=1} # in days
    y=`date +%Y`

    function build_year {
            set -A j X $( for m in 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12
                    {
                            cal $m $y | sed -e '1,2d' -e 's/^/ /' -e "s/ \([0-9]\)/ $m\/\1/g"
                    } )
            yeardays=$(( ${#j[*]} - 1 ))
    }

    build_year

    until [ $ago -lt $t ]
    do
            (( y=y-1 ))
            build_year
            (( ago = ago - t ))
            t=$yeardays
    done

    print ${j[$(( t - ago ))]}/$y

Answer 4

$var=$TZ;
TZ=$TZ+24;
date;
TZ=$var;

Will get you yesterday in AIX and set back the TZ variable back to original

Answer 5

If you have access to python, this is a helper that will get the yyyy-mm-dd date value for any arbitrary n days ago:

function get_n_days_ago {
  local days=$1
  python -c "import datetime; print (datetime.date.today() - datetime.timedelta(${days})).isoformat()"
}

# today is 2014-08-24

$ get_n_days_ago 1
2014-08-23

$ get_n_days_ago 2
2014-08-22

Answer 6

On Linux, you can use

date -d "-1 days" +"%a %d/%m/%Y"