Shell Programming and Scripting

Did you try running the suggestion Chubler_XL suggested before saying it won't work? His code won't print the current day's day of week, it will either give you a diagnostic saying that the date utility doesn't recognize a --date option, or it will do what you requested.

What OS are you using?

Maybe I don't understand what you're trying to do. You said you want the output:

Code:

07/01/14 15:47:22               179.9500      MONDAY
07/01/14 16:03:29               3.9500        MONDAY
06/26/14 11:59:43               19.8000	      WEDNESDAY
06/27/14 12:02:43               160.0000      TUESDAY
07/02/14 13:12:35               5.9500        FRIDAY
07/02/14 13:34:17               5.9500        SATURDAY

July 1, 2014 was a Tuesday; not a Monday.
June 26, 2014 was a Thursday; not a Wednesday.
June 27, 2014 was a Friday; not a Tuesday.
And, July 2, 2014 was a Wednesday; not a Friday and a Saturday???

Firstly, if I sounded dismissive I certainly did not intend my post to appear so, I genuinely appreciate people sharing their experience freely with novices like myself. So Chubler_XL if my post came across as offensive then I sincerely apologise.

No, I did not try the example, I read it with my unqualified skill level and assumed it would simply return todays date. I should have actually taken the time to type this in to the terminal, when I did, it indeed returned what I needed.

As for the erroneous data in my post, I simply hand typed some days against the original data, that is the reason the days chosen do not match the actual dates, it was purely for illustration purposes.

Again thank you to everyone for you assistance, and apologies for my incorrect assumptions. Lesson learned, when you don't know what you are talking about (that's me!), it's best to shut up

We don't want you to shut up. We want you to learn. When you ask a question, and you get one or more suggestions; if you don't understand what it does:And then:And, if you got something that works, but you can't figure out how it works, ask questions. Most of the volunteers who make suggestions here are happy to explain what their (or someone else's) code does. We want to help you learn how to make the most out of the tools that are available to you.

And, for other people reading this thread. If you wanted to do something like what was requested here on a system that doesn't have gawk and has a date utility that doesn't support the --date option, but you do have access to a 1993 or later version of the Korn shell (such as on Mac OS/X), you could also try:

Code:

#!/bin/ksh
while read d t v
do	printf '%s %-23s%-14s%(%A)T\n' "$d" "$t" "$v" "$d"
done < output

which with the given sample input file produces:

Code:

07/01/14 15:47:22               179.9500      Tuesday
07/01/14 16:03:29               3.9500        Tuesday
06/26/14 11:59:43               19.8000       Thursday
06/27/14 12:02:43               160.0000      Friday
07/02/14 13:12:35               5.9500        Wednesday
07/02/14 13:34:17               5.9500        Wednesday