Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi all,

Am flustered up with date... interesting what I had used to work in Fedora 4 and now with a system update to fedora 10 it doesn't and really not sure why?

I assign a variable: date_log=`date -d '1 day ago' +"%h %e"` which is for a specific system log that uses dates in format "Feb 5" losing the leading 0's. So I used this for about 2 years on fedora 4 by setting up log collections for last 10 days using the string format assigned to a variable, passed that to a function and grep'd out some stuff by day.

Now with fedora 10 bash strips the leading extra space after it puts it in the variable.

This works: foo=`date +"%h %e"` foo shows "Feb 5" with two spaces
this does not: foo=`date -d '1 day ago' +"%h %e"` foo shows "Feb 5" with one space. I can type the same date command at CLI and it shows two spaces. Interesting it worked fine in fedora 4??

Actual code truncated:

Code:

	case $menuDate in
	"1")	data_date=`date +%Y%m%d`
			data_date_log=`date +"%h %e"`
			data_date_dec=`date +%m%d`
			GetData ;;
	"2")	data_date=`date -d '1 day ago' +%Y%m%d`
			data_date_log=`date -d '1 day ago' +"%h %e"`
			data_date_dec=`date -d '1 day ago' +%m%d`
			GetData ;;

Get data simply greps out some dates such as:

Code:

grep "$data_date_log" $DIR3/errorlog.txt > /usb/$site'_'$data_date/$errorlog'_'$data_date.txt

Really confused why the space is now truncated.

I tried assigning the variable in quotes like date="$(date -d '1 day ago' +"%h %e")"

Tried using %b %_d as the format.

I can always get date to respond properly with appropriate formatting, but once I shove it into a variable the space goes away.

Idea's?

Thanks a bunch!

If you replace GetData ;; with echo "$data_date_log" ;; do you see the same behavior?

Or even try this cut-down script:

Code:

data_date_log=`date -d '1 day ago' +"%h %e"`
echo "$data_date_log"

I do I see the proper return if I quote after an echo, but not after a grep

so echo "$data_date" returns "Feb 5"
but grep "data_date" tries to find "Feb 5"

Very strange!

As pointed out by Franklin52 when he edited your original post for you: it is imperative that you use [code] and [/code] tags around any posted data or code. This stops things like double spaces line indents and such from being changed by the forum.

I'm guessing here that you meant that the echo has additional space between month and day but grep is still not finding the text. Can you post the actual grep statement you used and the data this it didn't match, using the code tags shown above.

Hi Chubler

Thanks for the code tag. So long story short I got it working and it was an idiotic fault. My system logs had no data on a few days I was trying which of course meant it failed as the grep had no data.

It's very easy to do

Don't know how many times I've added heaps of debug to a script only to realize I'm not even running the script I was editing.