Help in grep

thana · #1 (**permalink**) 06-17-2008

Hi folks,
I have a shell script which accepts 1 argument. Now I need the check if the argument that has been passed is of correct format.
The argument passed will be a date of the format ddmmyy. I want to match the pattern something like grep -e "[0-9]{6}".

Can any one please help me.

spirtle · #2 (**permalink**) 06-17-2008

How about using -c flag

Code:

echo $1|grep -Ec '^[0-9]{6}$'

which will give you 1 if the pattern (6 digits, no more and no less) matches and 0 otherwise?

jim mcnamara · #3 (**permalink**) 06-17-2008

note - that does not tell you if it is a valid date,:

Code:

>echo 999999 |grep -Ec '^[0-9]{6}$'
>1

Do you need to validate that it is a correct date or just numeric?

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