Question

I have a text file with the following dates in the format dd/mm/yyyy:

14/09/1992
15/04/1983
15/09/1961
02/06/1979
14/12/1971
08/02/2001
19/06/1999
14/09/1969
31/08/2002
30/07/1980
25/04/1973
03/01/1992

I want to convert this into the YYYY/mm/dd format in a script. I was planning to use the date command to do so:

date -f tempDate +%Y/%m/%d

but the thing is, it does not recognize the English-style dates and shows the following error as i believe it is reading it as mm/dd/yyyy when i don’t want it to:

date: invalid date `14/09/1992'

is there another way of doing this? or is there a way i can change the order of the date format?

also, I need this script to work on a server that I am not a sysadmin for.

Answer 1

If the file is as described why not just reverse the columns with awk:

$ awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS="/"}{print $3,$2,$1}' file
1992/09/14
1983/04/15
1961/09/15
1979/06/02
1971/12/14
2001/02/08
1999/06/19
1969/09/14
2002/08/31
1980/07/30
1973/04/25
1992/01/03

Edit:

Just as easy in awk with multiple field separator:

$ awk -F[/,] '{print $1","$2","$5"/"$4"/"$3}' <<< "name,number,14/09/1992"
name,number,1992/09/14