Shell Programming and Scripting

Also, I checked the /usr/bin directory and this is what i got

Code:

retailtest:RMST90:/u01/app/rms9.0/prd/oracle/proc/bin>ls /usr/bin/en*
/usr/bin/enable  /usr/bin/env

Probably you haven't installed Python. Anyways, i would not suggest installing it just because the way to solving your problem is not obvious.

Probably this is what you really need.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

Hopefully you have no problem. Try running the script this way:

Code:

python scriptname.py filename.xml

That should work. If it does not, run

Code:

which python

If there is no result, then you don't have Python on that system. In which case, I will be sad.

To fix my script (assuming you can run it by calling Python explicitly), try doing this:

Code:

which env

Whatever comes up is what you should replace the first line in my file with.

ShawnMilo

okay - bad news - no python on the system.
good news - there is perl on the system - so maybe we can write a perl script to do the same - right now I am sitting with a perl book in my hands...

Okay, here are the guts. See if this executes on your system:

Code:

perl -e 'use Time::Local; $fileDate = timelocal(0, 0, 0, 12, 2, 2008); $now = time(); $diff = ($now - $fileDate) / (24*60*60); print "The file is $diff days old.\n"'

Note: The month must be decremented by one, because timelocal uses months 0-11 instead of 1-12.

If that command works on your system, then you should be able to piece the rest of the Perl script together around it without too much trouble.

ShawnMilo

yippeee!!!
this worked - it gave me the following output :

The file is 0.603263888888889 days old.


so i guess this was testing against 03/12/2008 00:00:00 - so I can pass my date that i extract to the file as parameters to this perl program and return the difference back to my shell script, right??

Thanks again for your help - I might bug you again if i have trouble with writing the perl program...

Yay!

Yes, you are correct about it comparing it to midnight.

Feel free to ask questions. You should pretty much be able to use the Python script as a framework and replace each line with Perl. I would do it myself, but today is a busier day at work than yesterday was.

I'm still bummed that you don't have Python, though. It's so much nicer to work with than Perl -- especially for a beginner. Perl rocks for the super-dense one-liners and regex-intensive short scripts, but Python is cleaner and easier to learn.

ShawnMilo