Question

I’m working on this function that basically works on 2 dates.
One is the current date, the other is a 1 month ago date.
Heres the code:

 dateTale=$(date -d "$(date) - 1 month" +%Y%m%d)
 now=$(date +%Y%m%d)
 while ["$dateTale" -lt "$now"]
  do 
   $dateTale=$(date -d "$dateTale + 1 day" +%Y%m%d) 
  echo "adding" 
 done

As you can see i’m trying to increase dateTale until it reaches the current date, buit i keep on getting the error message: [20120703: command not found
I tried removing the quotes from within the while statement but still same error message.
But even when resolved, will -lt calculate the actual date value or the numeric one?

Any advice?

Answer 1

Spaces are important when using the [ command:

while [ "$dateTale" -lt "$now" ]

Also, you don’t use the ‘$’ when assigning to variables (unlike perl or php):

dateTale=$(date -d "$dateTale + 1 day" +%Y%m%d)