I need to be able to use the current date and calculate 7 days ago to be stored in another variable to be passed to a file in my Unix shell script. I need the date in the following format:

date '+%m/%d/%Y'
or
05/16/2006

How do I calculate date minus 7 days or 1 week ago?

.... by reading the FAQs

I read through the FAQs and still could not find a solution that works. One solution fails if the date is the 1st, like today (6/1/2006). I think that I'm going to have to go with another selection of using sqlplus to get the date from Oracle.

Even none of those?

hi there,
date -d '1 week ago'
or
date -d '7 days ago'
will give the date and time of exactly a week ago.
You can use '1 month ago' 'yesterday', '2 hours ago', etc..
For future dates, use 'tomorrow', '2 hours now', '1 week now', etc

Any date before/after any time period can be displayed this way.

Month=$(date -d '1 week ago' +%m)
Day=$(date -d '1 week ago' +%d)
Year=$(date -d '1 week ago' +%y)

echo $Month "/" $Day "/" $Year

this is GNU-ism and is not guaranteed to be installed.