UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have a url that I need to get using wget. This url string needs to contain two values referring to today's date and a date 3 months from now. I have it mostly finished, I think, but am having difficulty with concatenating the date variable with the url string.

Code:

today=`date "+%m%d%Y"`;
plus3months=`date -v +3m "+%m%d%Y"`;

url="http://www.example.com/schedule/Access?&pStartDate=" . $today . "&pEndDate=" . $plus3months . "&pServiceID=12552";

wget --output-document=report.csv $url;

This returns an error on the third line, that starts with "url".

"line 21: 06192008: No such file or directory"

I'm thinking that it has something to do with my two date variables being integers and not strings but i'm not certain.

What do i need to adjust?
thanks!

No idea what shell you are using, but in ksh you can't use the dot to concatenate like in php or perl. You just write it inside double quotation marks and the variables will be substituted inside that. And in shell scripts, der is no ";" to end a line. I think you mixed up something from php or perl into shell.

would should look like

Code:

url="http://www.example.com/schedule/Access?&pStartDate=${today}&pEndDate=${plus3months}&pServiceID=12552"

To have no problems with the substitution you should put your variable names into curled braces like I did up there.

thanks zaxxon! that worked.