Shell Programming and Scripting

abc	12/1/2001	SSE
def	2/25/2007	SE
ghi	3/18/2009	SA
abc	8/1/2008	SSE
def	2/13/2007	SE
ghi	3/24/2005	SA

#!/usr/bin/bash

if [ $# -ne "2" ]; then
        echo "incorrect format:   $0 date date"
        echo "example: ./list_times 01/16/2009 04/01/2009"
        echo "example: ./list_times 2009-01-16 04/01/2009"
        exit 1
fi

if [ $2 = "-today" ]; then
        TODAY=`date +%m/%d/%Y`
        /usr/bin/echo -n  $1 " "

                 echo "("$(date -d $1 +%s)-$(date -d $TODAY +%s)")/86400" | bc
 else
                 echo "("$(date -d $1 +%s)-$(date -d $2 +%s)")/86400" | bc
fi

# for your example, I simply created a file called emp, and run it through a for loop, but should give you an idea how to incorporate into a script.

for EMP in `awk '{ print $2 }' emp`
  do 
      ./list_times $EMP -today
done

>cat empl.txt | tr "/" " " | awk '{printf "%04d%02d%02d,%-40s,%-40s\n", $4,$2,$3,$1,$5}' | sort
20011201,abc                                     ,SSE
20050324,ghi                                     ,SA
20070213,def                                     ,SE
20070225,def                                     ,SE
20080801,abc                                     ,SSE
20090318,ghi                                     ,SA