Any system can only elaborate data based on what you feed it with, data & algorithm.
A “working day” is a humain professional concern, and, AFAICS, this information is not stored _yet_ in any standard *nix system.

hacked a bit the script with an if loop, if today = Monday, then use yesterday = Friday, else use `date –date=yesterday +%A`, but is not quite an elegant solution.

Elegant or not, system has to store this information before giving it back to you.

FTTOMH, as you want to compare the 2 most recent dump files, another way to do it without this worrying about working days would simply be to select the 2 most recent dump files to compare them, based on modification time.

Nevertheless, on one hand, this involves at least extra coding instead of a simple test, and may be less secure, for instance if you do not check that every dump went fine.

On the other hand, this algorithm would work in any situation, that is, it would always test the 2 most recent dump files, whatever calendar events, closing days, holidays, whatsoever.

What do you think Chunky?

– Philippe

I am afraid syntax is unclear to you.
Regarding each token (day, month) syntax may be either using minus sign, either using “ago” word. So that all 4 expressions are referring to one unique date:

date –date “2 months ago 5 days ago”
date –date “- 2 months – 5 days”
date –date “2 months ago – 5 days”
date –date “- 2 months 5 days ago”

Is it clear to you now?

– Philippe

I am having a script to check filesize’s difference between two consecutive days dumps. The DB dumps are created every WORKING day (Monday-Friday) and they all have the same name + the full name day of the week, i.e. dumpFile.Monday.dump, dumpFile.Tuesday.dump … dumpFile.Friday.dump.

In my script I try to use `date +%A` for today and `date –date=yesterday +%A` for yesterday, however this (obviously) doesn’t work for Monday, when I get yesterday as being Sunday, whereas I want Friday.

I hacked a bit the script with an if loop, if today = Monday, then use yesterday = Friday, else use `date –date=yesterday +%A`, but is not quite an elegant solution.

I wonder if there’s a way that on any given date, to be able to get previous WORKING day.

Cheers

This article has been updated with information on the date command with additional examples.

Vivek should amend this one, right Vivek ?

i know something is not right here please advice.

I am looking for some ideas to print out dates in between 2 dates in YYYY-mm-dd format in unix.

any advice is appreciated.

thanks

date --date "2 months 5 days ago"

doesn’t return the date two months and five days ago but rather the date which was five days before the date which will be in two months. It tells date something like “plus 2 months minus 5 days”.

Of course, this might be what you wanted. But to be corresponding to your descripten, it would have to be

date --date "2 months ago 5 days ago"

(i missed the TODAYR (is day number from 1-7) in my prev email)
TODAY=`date +%d-%m-%Y`
TODAYR=`date +%u`
if [ ${TODAYR} -eq 5 ]
then
DD2=`TZ=”GMT-72″ date +’%d’`
else
DD2=`TZ=”GMT-24″ date +’%d’`
fi
if [ ${DD} -gt ${DD2} ]
then

Here is a nice one it calculate the latest working day of the month maybe it’s usefull
TODAY=`date +%d-%m-%Y`
if [ ${TODAYR} -eq 5 ]
then
DD2=`TZ=”GMT-72″ date +’%d’`
else
DD2=`TZ=”GMT-24″ date +’%d’`
fi
if [ ${DD} -gt ${DD2} ]
then
another script on the latest work day of the month

else

exit

Please let me know
Thanks,
Rajesh

May be wordpress word entry has eaten some of your characters,
here is an equivalent rephrase of what you gave,
to print last day of current month on GNU/BASH shell

date --date "next month - $(date +%d) day"