Have you ever spent countless time writing a shell script trying to say you want all “data” between this date and that date. I’ve had numerous scripts like this. Well, recently I got tired of doing this so I re-read the man page for “date” and came across this helpful time.
Normally when I use date I format it how I like, such as 2008-12-16. To do this I could do
date +%Y-%m-%d
Or to do 12-16-2008
date +%m-%d-%Y
But here is the real gem. I needed to find out what date it was 6 months ago, so this is what I did.
date +%Y-%m-%d –date=’6 months ago’
And it gave me the correct date of 2008-06-16
