UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi. I came across a script that grabs the 3-char month with this command:

MON=`date "+%b"`


The problem is that we need the return value to be in lower case and this is returning a intial capital letter on the string. So then the script does a bunch of IF statements to force the string to lower case. Like this:


# RECODE THE 3-CHAR MONTH FROM INITIAL CAPS TO LOWER CASE TO MATCH TTMS
# DIRECTORY NAMES ON THE SERVER
if [ $MON = Jan ]
then
month=jan
fi;
if [ $MON = Feb ]
then
month=feb
fi;
...more

Is there a better way to force the string to be lowercase in the bourne shell? Thanks in advance!

use command line tool "tr"

Thanks. This works fine as long as my string I want to lower case is in a file, but what I really want is to pass the string from the command I'm already using:

MON=`date "+%b"`

Can this be done using the tr command?

In Unix, everything is a file ;-)

MON=`date "+%b" | tr ...`

Without depending on external tools...

Code:

MON=$(date +%b)
case $MON in
    [jJ][aA][nN]) MON="jan" ;;
    [fF][eE][bB]) MON="feb" ;;
.
.
.
    [dD][eE][cC]) MON="dec";;
    *)  echo "Dont know of a MONTH like $MON" ;;
esac

Perfect! I appreciate all the help.