Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi I want to basically sort some data files that I have based on the date.
Here is my issue, the date is in the form of "2010-05-24T09:48:55-04"

All I really need is the date so perhaps I could sort the number 20100524 in this case.

My question is how do extract a number that I can later sort from this date format using regex or something simple??

Thank you in advance!

You can use usual string sort for dates in this format. But if you want extract them use this perl regex:

Code:

echo 'the date is in the form of "2010-05-24T09:48:55-04"' |
perl -lne '/(\d{4})-(\d{2})-(\d{2})/ && print "$1$2$3"'