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If you rearrange the date into YYYY/MM/DD HH:MM:SS, it sorts alphabetically and can be compared by simple > >= < <= in awk.
$ cat dcomp.awk

BEGIN {
FS="[ \t\\[\\]/:]+"
...

I don't think xargs is quite applicable here.

What do the lines really look like? Obscure what you must, but as is they're a little too generic.