Shell Programming and Scripting

I have the following script (which works fine), escept I don't know how to make the MONTH and DAY show up with leading zeros. I have a statement (not in this script) which will show this in a YYYYMMDD format, but the script makes the MONTH and DAY fields show single digits. For today, as an example, it will show 2005122 when I want it to show 20051202. Please tell me how to make it show leading zeros. Here's the code:

date '+%m %d %Y' |
{
read MONTH DAY YEAR
DAY=`expr "$DAY" - 1`
case "$DAY" in
0)
MONTH=`expr "$MONTH" - 1`
case "$MONTH" in
0)
MONTH=12
YEAR=`expr "$YEAR" - 1`
;;
esac
DAY=`cal $MONTH $YEAR | grep . | fmt -1 | tail -1`
esac
echo "Yesterday was: $MONTH $DAY $YEAR"
}

Thanks.

Ok i dont know much about scripting but what if in the $MONTH and $DAY fileds you make it 0 $MONTH and 0$DAY. i dont know if scripting is like html where it just ignores zeros until specifically told to recognize them or what just a thought.

man printf

oh, and your script won't quite work.

(did I pass? )

Carl

You can use the typeset command in ksh to add leading zeros. Specifically typeset -Zn, where n is the total length that you want the numeric string to be.

Code:

$ dsimpg1=20
$ echo $dsimpg1
20
$ typeset -Z3 dsimpg1
$ echo $dsimpg1
020

Oh, I like that one. I'll have to make a note of it for a script I have at work.

Thanks.

Carl