With the format of the strings you are comparing, a string comparison is sufficient, but that type of comparison is not supported by the standard test expressionand [ expression ] utilities. If you're using a recent bash or a 1993 or later version of ksh as your shell, you could use the conditional expression (as suggested by RavinderSingh13 that has been added to the syntax of their command languages:

Code:

if [[ $date1 < $date2 ]]; then echo yes; fi

or more simply:

Code:

[[ $date1 < $date2 ]] && echo yes

This should work fine up to the point that you want to compare a date in the year 9999 to a date in the year 10000.

Note that the command Ravinder suggested:

Code:

if [[ $VAL1 < $VAL2 ]]
then
        echo "Yes"
else
        echo "No"
fi

is performing a string comparison (even though VAL1 an VAL2 have been set to numeric strings. This will work as long as both numeric strings contain the same number of digits, but is dangerous in the general case. When comparing numeric strings it is safer to use the numeric comparison operators (-lt, -le, -eq, -ge, -gt, and -ne) instead of the string comparison operators (<, <=, ==, >=, >, and !=) available in the [[ expression ]] syntax.