Bash - convert string to date

Question

I need to convert to date in bash a string which has the hour included, such as: 2012-02-09-18, and store the result inside a variable, so that I can compare such strings as dates. If I use for conversion

  date -d "2012-02-09-18"

it will crash with "Invalid date error". How can I do this?

Have a look at: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11144408/convert-string-to-date-in-bash — Rakholiya Jenish, Jun 20 '15 at 10:18
what would be the desired output? because it is not clear if you want to remove the hour or not — fedorqui, Jun 20 '15 at 12:04

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 20 '15 at 10:21

4

Try this with bash's parameter expansion:

a="2012-02-09-18"
date -d "${a%-*} ${a#*-*-*-*}"

Output:

Thu Feb  9 18:00:00 CET 2012

answered Jun 20 '15 at 10:21

Cyrus

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score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 20 '15 at 10:14

3

You can tweak input to make it parseable by date using sed:

str='2012-02-09-18'

date -d "$(sed 's/-\([^-]*\)$/ \1/' <<< "$str")"
Thu Feb  9 18:00:00 EST 2012

answered Jun 20 '15 at 10:14

anubhava

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Bash - convert string to date

2 Answers2