Question

I have an array of values $dates that I’m transforming:

for i in $dates
do
  date -d "1970-01-01 $i sec UTC" '+%a_%D' 
done

Is there a way to save the result of this operation so I can pipe it to something else without writing it to a file on disk?

Answer 1

Create a function:

foo () {
        for i in $@
        do
                date -d "1970-01-01 $i sec UTC" '+%a_%D'
        done
}

Then you can e.g. send the output to standard error:

echo `foo $dates` >&2