What i'm trying to do is to use grep to search through a few files for a selected daemon and only report on today's date.
I think I got it sorted apart from in the txt file the date has 2 gaps between the month and the day, and the way I have the date format only puts in one gap any help to get the 2 gaps would be greatly received or maybe another method to get the report
td=$(date '+%b %d')
grep -n $dinput /var/log/message* | grep "$td" >> /home/report.txt
I am not having any problem in using this..
I created one txt file with two lines.
$ cat checking.txt
Date operation
Nov 02
Then executed the below commands
$ td=$(date '+%b %d')
$ $ grep "$td" checking.txt
Nov 02
Got the Output with two spaces in between.
So check whether the month are in caps in the files.
you know one thing, the below two commands give different results.
$ td=$(date '+%b %d')
$ echo "$td"
Nov 02
It has two spaces in-between
$ echo $td
Nov 02
It has one space in-between
As they should.
echo prints its arguments separated by a single space.
If you quote $td, you are giving echo one argument. If you don't quote it, the shell expands the variable and performs word splitting on the result, giving two arguments to echo.
I have just realized that the log file I was trying to grep saves any single dates as eg: Nov 2 with 2 spaces not Nov 02 
so when I created the script it was the 1st of Nov so the today variable wouldn't have worked so my prob is to try and get today's date format to output 1 didget with a double space for the single days as i tried to hard code the date as the below code and it worked
grep -n $dinput /var/log/message* | grep 'Nov 2' >> /home/report.txt