Grep search for value between dates

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi
I am new to scripting and I have a requirement to grep a value from large numbers of xml files and see if this value exist then I want to check the date and see if it falls between two dates (eg: today and feb 17), then print the name of file. the values in xml file is as follow
Name="TNT_License_End" Value="2012-12-29"
first check for TNT_Licencse_End then for the date if it actually between today and Feb 17.
Thank you in anticipation for you help.

2

grep does not understand dates, it is not a programming language. awk is a programming language, and better suited.

You are lucky, the dates are in YYYY-MM-DD order, which is directly sortable and comparable with > < string comparisons.

We probably need to see more of the XML.

3

This might work, depending on your XML.

$ awk -v FIRST="2012-12-28" -v LAST="2012-12-31" '
                (NR==1) { F=FILENAME }
                F!=FILENAME { if(M) print F; F=FILENAME ; M=0 }
                /TNT_License_End/ && match($0, "Value=\"[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]\"") {
                        V=substr($0,RSTART+7,RLENGTH-8)
                        if((V <= LAST)&&(V >= FIRST)) M=1 }
                END { if(M) print F }' input1.xml input2.xml

input1.xml

$
4 
#!/bin/bash

CURR_DATE=$( date +"%s" )
PREV_DATE=$( date -d"2012-02-17" +"%s" )                

extr_xmld=$( awk -F"Value=" '/TNT_License_End/ { gsub("\"","",$2); print $2; } ' xml_file )
XMLF_DATE=$( date -d"$extr_xmld" +"%s" )

if [ ${XMLF_DATE} -ge ${PREV_DATE} ] && [ ${XMLF_DATE} -le ${CURR_DATE} ]
then
        echo "Is between Feb 17 & Today"
else
        echo "Is not between Feb 17 & Today"
fi
5

Like I said, YYYY-MM-DD dates are directly sortable as strings. There's no need to convert them to epoch seconds.

6

thanks alot for your prompt response, I think the code is very close to what I expect but the date I mean is going to end on feb 17th of 2013, also there is an error -ge: unary operator expected.
thank you again for your help

7

Looks like XMLF_DATE is not set, perform below changes:-

#!/bin/bash

CURR_DATE=$( date +"%s" )
PREV_DATE=$( date -d"2012-02-17" +"%s" )                

extr_xmld=$( awk -F"Value=" '/TNT_License_End/ { gsub("\"","",$2); print $2; } ' xml_file )
if [ ! -z $extr_xmld ]
then
 XMLF_DATE=$( date -d"$extr_xmld" +"%s" )

 if [ ${XMLF_DATE} -ge ${PREV_DATE} ] && [ ${XMLF_DATE} -le ${CURR_DATE} ]
 then
        echo "Is between Feb 17 & Today"
 else
        echo "Is not between Feb 17 & Today"
 fi
fi
8

I suggest my solution, which works in one command for many files instead of four commands for one file. It also doesn't require the nonstandard -d GNU date extension -- AIX almost certainly doesn't have it.