Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello everyone, I need some help with writing a awk program. What I need to do is be able to set date fields in the file to read mm/dd/yyyy.

Thank You

Not sure what you mean aojmoj.. can you elaborate on what you're trying to do? What's the purpose of the program? What do you mean "set date fields in the file to read mm/dd/yyyy"?

Are you looking to change from one date format to another?

im haveing trouble understanding what you mean by setting date fields in a file to read mm/dd/yyyy.

can you provide some examples of what you are trying to do?

There are 87 fields or columns in the field and some of them are date fields. I need to change the format of the date from 10/29/03 to 10/29/2003. What can I add to a scripts to make that happen on each field.

can you post a segment of your data, so we can see the format befor we make any suggestions.

Some thoughts...

1) First things first, how do you identify 87 your fields? Are they delimited or positional?
2) Do you now which fields are dates? If not you will probably have to match against a regexp to determine the field format and decide whether it is a date but this is dodgy because of the slim chance of mistaken identity.
3) Are all the original date formats the same? Same situation as (2), altering the manipulation code.
4) Are all the dates 2000+?
5) You could use split to divide the field into mm/dd/yy then change the year and reconstitute.
6) As a tangent, you could also do the job with a sed single substitute command if all the dates are the same original format and 2000+ but the single line command could match other non-date fields which happen to resemble the form of the fields you want to change.