UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have been reformatting dates from a data file to make them mysql compliant.

Code:

31-10-2011	 Loc1
1-11-2011	 Loc2

The first can be captured by this:

Code:

sed -i '' -e "s#\(..\)-\(..\)-\(....\)#\3-\2-\1#" data.txt

and leads to:

Code:

2011-10-31	 Loc1

The second line is captured as follows:

Code:

sed -i '' -e "s#\(.\)-\(..\)-\(....\)#\3-\2-0\1#" data.txt

and leads to:

Code:

2011-11-01	 Loc2

but changes the first line into this:

Code:

20131	 -10-01Loc1

However, I dont see how the second line matches with the first line and changes the format. How do I correct this?

Thank you in advance

Try with this ..

Code:

$ sed "/^[0-9]-/s#\(.\)-\(..\)-\(....\)#\3-\2-0\1#" infile
31-10-2011       Loc1
2011-11-01       Loc2

Works great, thank you.