Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I am trying to compare two dates but its not giving me desired results.

Code:

date1=8-Feb-10
date2=31-Jan-10
export date1
export date2
if [ $date1 -gt $date2 ]
then
echo "$date1 is greater than $date2"
else
echo "$date2 is greater than or equal to $date1"
fi

The result it give is:

Code:

31-Jan-10 is greater than or equal to 8-Feb-10

.

Have you tried using YYYYMMDD format? in this format you can evaluate as number and the result is correct.

Hi,

Thanks for your reply!! But I had already tried changing the format to yyyymmdd before your reply and it worked. Thanks anyways...

Is there any other method to do so without changing it to yyyymmdd format as it takes it as number while doing the comparision? Do we have any function/method in UNIX which converts a string to date format?

:| I'm sorry, I don't know, I just can think in create a function to compare the dates, internally this function convert the dates from dd-MMM-yy to YYYYMMDD if "necesarily/needed" (sorry about my pour english)

If you convert the date to epoch (seconds since time started in unix world), you would then be able to compare those numbers.

Code:

\tmp>date +%s -d"8-feb-10"
1265605200

If you set a var for each result, then you would be able to determine which is larger.