What's the syntax error? And why did you add the "read vardate" stuff? You're supposed to pass in the date on the command line. Of course, you can change that, but then you need to modify the rest of the script accordingly.

When passing a value with spaces in it, you need to use quotes:

grep "Tues Feb 8" traffic/127.0.0.1

#!/bin/sh

case $# in 0) echo syntax: $0 files ...; exit 2;; esac

echo enter date:
read date

grep "$date" "$@"