How to determine date 2 days ago

[vsemaska]

Greetings,

I'm new to Linux and I'm trying to detemine how to get the date that was 2 days ago. My experience is primarily with HP Tru64 UNIX and on it this command works (The date being 20070605):

# (export TZ; TZ=UTC+48; date '+%Y%m%d')
20070603

On RedHat Linux I get yesterday's date:
# (export TZ; TZ=UTC+48; date '+%Y%m%d')
20070604

So, what's the proper way to do this on Linux.

Thanks,
Vic

[Sivel]

You could do something like this:

shell> expr $(date '+%Y%m%d') - 2

[vsemaska]

You could do something like this:

shell> expr $(date '+%Y%m%d') - 2

Thanks for the reply but that doesn't handle when the previous date is in the previous month. Say I wanted the date 5 days ago, your approach would give me:

# expr $(date '+%Y%m%d') - 5
20070600
not
20070531


Vic

[Sivel]

Hmmm...I overlooked that.

Maybe perl could lend its assistance:

perl -le 'printf("%04d%02d%02d\n",(localtime(time-(86400*$ARGV[0])))[5] + 1900,(localtime(time-(86400*$ARGV[0])))[4],(localtime(time-(86400*$ARGV[0])))[3])' 2

The 2 on the end could be replaced with any number. That is the number of days to subtract from the current day.

[Franklin52]

Try this:

date --date='2 days ago'

Regards

[ghostdog74]

you can type 'info date" and see some examples of how to use the GNU date "2 days ago" example.. (assuming you have info and GNU date of course)

[vsemaska]

Try this:

date --date='2 days ago'

Regards

Figures it would be something that simple, thanks.
Vic