Question

I have a file containing 14000 dates . I wrote a script to find the last 5 days ,

26/03/2002:11:52:25
27/03/2002:11:52:25
29/03/2002:11:30:41
30/03/2002:11:30:41
26/03/2002:11:30:41
02/04/2002:11:30:41
03/04/2002:11:30:41
04/04/2002:11:30:41
05/04/2002:11:52:25
06/04/2002:11:52:25

suppose this is the file , now I have date 02/04/2002:11:30:41 as an out put . I want to put the dates from 02/04/2002 till the end of the file in another file .

start-date = 02/04/2002 (this is my start date) 
while [start-date lt end-date] do (while start date is less than end date )
start-date++ ( add one day to start day so if its 2/4/2002 it will become 3/4/2002)
echo $start-date|tee -a file1  (put it in a file)

this code suppose to do so but it has problem ! why?

grep -n $SDATE thttpd.log | cut -d: -f1 (pattern=$SDATE)
sed '/$SDATE/=' thttpd.log
awk '/$SDATE/{ print NR }' thttpd.log
$ sed -n "$(awk '$SDATE/ { print NR }' input),$ p" thttpd.log
$ awk 'NR >= line_number' line_number=$(grep -n $SDATE -m 1 thttpd.log | cut -d: -f1) thttpd.log

Answer 1

Assuming that the file is sorted by date-time:

 sed -n '\.^02/04/2002.,$p' dates.list > results.list

Prints from the first line starting with 02/04/2002 to the end of the file.