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Date command to obtain the last month is not working correctly..

 
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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Date command to obtain the last month is not working correctly..
# 8  
Old 02-23-2010
@tigersk
I don't have your O/S handy. Does my circumvention of using a day in the middle of the month work on your O/S ?
# 9  
Old 03-11-2010
MySQL
Quote:
Originally Posted by methyl
@ungalnanban

The o/p highlights the fact that his date command does not work if today's day number did not exist in the previous month.
e.g. 31/03/10 is a valid date but 31/02/10 is not. The o/s in use translates 31/02/10 into 03/03/10 ! Because the o/p wanted the previous month number it is wrong.
My circumvention is to fool "date" that is mid-month but I can't test the syntax without having a copy of Redhat.

Can you try it on your test system and post the results.
I am using debian. the data command internally calculate the date is valid or not.

So you believe the date command will give valid date.
# 10  
Old 03-11-2010
From GNU date Info: (coreutils.info.gz) Relative items in date strings
Code:
   The fuzz in units can cause problems with relative items.  For
example, `2003-07-31 -1 month' might evaluate to 2003-07-01, because
2003-06-31 is an invalid date.  To determine the previous month more
reliably, you can ask for the month before the 15th of the current
month.  For example:

     $ date -R
     Thu, 31 Jul 2003 13:02:39 -0700
     $ date --date='-1 month' +'Last month was %B?'
     Last month was July?
     $ date --date="$(date +%Y-%m-15) -1 month" +'Last month was %B!'
     Last month was June!



---------- Post updated at 02:45 PM ---------- Previous update was at 02:36 PM ----------

You may want to write your own shell function which behaves in a similar way to the Oracle SQL function...
Code:
SQL> select add_months('31-Jul-2003',-1) from dual;
30-Jun-2003
 
SQL> select add_months('30-Jun-2003',-1) from dual;
31-May-2003

If the date is the last day of the month or if the resulting month has fewer days than the day component of date, then the result is the last day of the resulting month. Otherwise, the result has the same day component as date.
 
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