Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi Smiling Dragon, cfajohnson, Scrutinizer, & Aia,
If you look closely at the 1st post in this thread, you'll notice that the request is to find timestamps in unspecified fields in a CSV formatted file where the input timestamps are in the format MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS and the output timestamps are supposed to be one month later in the format DD/Mon/YYYY HH:MM:SS.

So, there is no reason to believe that using / as a field separator on an input line will yield only three fields, that the first field will just contain a month number, nor that the third field will only contain a year and a timestamp. None of the code suggested so far makes any attempt to adjust the output month, to adjust the day field if the output month has fewer days than the input month, nor to adjust the year if the input month is 12.

Three days ago (less than an hour after the original post), I asked the submitter to provide us with more details and to show us what had been tried to solve this problem. I figured that the code that would be shown to us would clarify if the conversion from month number 06 to abbreviated month name Jul was intentional or a typo, would clarify if the field separator in the CSV file format was a comma or some other character, and would clarify whether every input field needed to be processed or if only certain fields need to be processed. Unfortunately, I am still waiting for a response.

I'm choosing to assume the month mismatch is an error on OPs part (dangerous I know but they've only talked about format in the text).
I've deliberately written the snippet to expect a date string and nothing else. As we've not seen any examples of the input stream I figure OP can sort that out

I hang my head in shame for using a GNU date feature, I actually hadn't realised it didn't exist on the bog-standard date <wrist slap>

Why? The GNU utilities are so ubiquity that chances are that it would work for the OP as well as for anyone searching how to do something similar. In fact, you have used the GNU date all this time, without knowing you could have been using another crippled version.

Code:

s/crippled/standard/

Exactly, it can be substituted, since in the context I wrote it, it is interchangeable.

I am waiting for Don to appear.

It seems that you don't care about portable code. It seems that you don't care about making suggestions that will work on any system likely to be used by the readers of this forum. It seems that you frequently make suggestions without testing them and believe that readers should be smart enough to ignore the suggestions you make that might not work on their system (on any system).

But, there are many users on these forums (including me) who are using UNIX systems that do not include GNU date.

Moderator's Comments:

Please do not denigrate users (like cfajohnson, Scrutinizer, and Smiling Dragon) who: try to write portable code, warn readers that extensions are being used that might not be portable, or ask question submitters what OS and shell they're using so suggestions can be made that will work in the submitter's environment. Please also review rule 2 in the rules you agreed to when you joined this forum.

Don,

I do accept you have the right to interpret the rules as it suits you and when it suits you, as moderator. But I have not denigrated any user. Smiling Dragon made a comment I thought it was too hard on himself/herself, and I responded with my sincere opinion that I thought it was valuable his/her contribution. Of course, a smart-ass innuendo remark had it to be made about my chosen word "crippled".