Shell Programming and Scripting

# a bunch of initializition steps are here ...
STARTDATE=`date +%Y%m%d`
 
while [ 1 ] # loop running all the time. 
do

NOWDATE=`date +%Y%m%d`

# if day changes then i want to reinitialize
if [ $NOWDATE -gt $STARTDATE ] 
then
# do all that initiallization again 
fi

# ... a bunch of other code in here

done

$
$ cat -n t1.sh
     1  #!/bin/bash
     2
     3  # a bunch of initializition steps are here ...
     4  STARTDATE=`date +%Y%m%d`
     5  echo "STARTDATE = $STARTDATE"
     6
     7  NOWDATE=`date +%Y%m%d`
     8  if [ $NOWDATE -gt $STARTDATE ]; then
     9    echo "in if (-gt)  : NOWDATE = $NOWDATE"
    10  else
    11    echo "in else (-le): NOWDATE = $NOWDATE"
    12  fi
    13
    14  NOWDATE="20091108"
    15  if [ $NOWDATE -gt $STARTDATE ]; then
    16    echo "in if (-gt)  : NOWDATE = $NOWDATE"
    17  else
    18    echo "in else (-le): NOWDATE = $NOWDATE"
    19  fi
    20
$
$ . t1.sh
STARTDATE = 20091107
in else (-le): NOWDATE = 20091107
in if (-gt)  : NOWDATE = 20091108
$
$