Question

I’m working on a Bash script (using Cygwin) that uses cURL to scrape a web page and check a certain date value. My cURL and grep calls result in the following line:

<span style="float:right">Last Update: 9/30/2011 3:16:31 AM</span><p>

What I need to do with the date is check if it is within the last n days. What is the best way to approach this, and how should I parse the date?

Answer 1

Something like:

DATESTRING="$(sed -e 's/.*Last Update: \([^<]*\)<.*/\1/' $MYINPUT)"
UPDATE=$(date -d "$DATESTRING" +%s) 
EPOCH=$(date -d "-$n days" +%s)
test "$UPDATE" -ge "$EPOCH" && echo "It's new!"