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Asked: 2026-06-07T23:08:42+00:00

this is a question similar to this one . But I am not good

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this is a question similar to this one.

But I am not good at shell scripting, so I still want to ask you for help…

My situation is a little different: the date string is in the file.

These files (more than 700) are named msg00000.html to msg00721.html. Each one have a line like this:

<li><em>Date</em>: Thu, 22 Jul 2010 00:44:57 +0800</li>

After a lot of googling, I finally find them out using this:

grep "<li><em>Date" msg00000.html | cut -d' ' -f2-7 | tr -d "</li>"

The output is exactly what I want:

Thu, 22 Ju 2010 00:44:57 +0800

And I know use touch -md "Thu, 22 Ju 2010 00:44:57 +0800" msg00000.html can modify the mtime.

However, would anyone could help me combining them together? And do this for 723 files…

Thanks…

Edit

Well, I finally figured out how to:

for f in *.html; do touch -md "$(grep '<li><em>Date' $f | cut -d' ' -f2-7 | sed 's/<\/li>//')" "$f"; done

That’s quite a long command…

Actually the problem is in the tr command. It delete all the characters when using -d, not the pattern. So the date Thu, 22 Ju 2010 00:44:57 +0800 is wrong. It should be Thu, 22 Jul 2010 00:44:57 +0800. Yes, there is an “l” missing, which was deleted by tr -d. LOL.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team
    for i in {0..721}; do touch -md "`grep '<li><em>Date' $(printf 'msg%05d.html' $i) | sed -e 's#<[^>]*>##g' | cut -d' ' -f2-7`" $(printf 'msg%05d.html' $i); done

    I’m sure an awk guru will be along shortly to show us how to do it in 20 characters, but this should do the trick.

    EDIT: Remember, kids, it’s important to get some sleep instead of trying to answer questions on the internet. You don’t want to end up posting ridiculous answers like this, do you?

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