any ideas?

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

i need to compare to dates/times given in the format MMDDhhmmYY. That is month, day, hour, minute, year. It is a 24 hour clock. I need to compare two dates to check that they are, say, less than 900 seconds apart. I have got to a point where it checks the time, turns the values into seconds and then does the check. the problem will occur if the 2 dates are different. i need some way of adding in the possibility that the times could be either side of midnight and therefore be on different days.

2

btw all im really looking for is an idea of how to solve this rather than actual code.

Thanks

3

Why dont you consider both the timestamps as timestamps since epoch ? In this case, you can get the difference without worrying about the actual date.

If you have GNU date, see the -d flag and the %s option ?

4

hope this will give you an idea to work on. This works on Linux.

# Current Date
$ echo $(date +%m%e%H%M%g)
0727181407
$ echo $(date -d "15 min ago" "+%m%e%H%M%g")
0727175907
5

I have a variable with the date stored in the format MMDDhhmmYY and i cant change that i just have to work from that

6

You dont have to change MMDDhhmmYY. Rather start with that, regroup it as 'hh:mm YYMMDD' and pass it to date -d.

For eg consider 0727123407. It would eventually become date -d "12:34 070727" +%s