Question

Is there a way to calculate a time stamp for the next coming up of a week day?

So for instance, with friday, i’d like to be able to run some code that calculates that from today Wednesday 19/05/10, the next friday will be 21/05/10 and get a time stamp from it.

I know the date command can parse a given string date according to a format, but I can’t figure out how to calculate “next friday from today”

Any idea?

EDIT: I’m on a mac

Answer 1

With GNU date:

date -d 'this Friday' '+%d/%m/%y'

See Relative items in date strings, part of the GNU date documentatoin. There are also examples.