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FENIL SHAH
FENIL SHAH

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Day-10: Bash Scripting - #2

Day-10: So I did continued with bash scripting today! Going more deep in bash scripts! Check out my Bash Scripting - #1 before reading the below notes!

Variables!

  • In bash syntax, variables $1 to represent the first command-line argument, $2 to represent the second command-line argument, and so on. And “$@” is the variable name for all arguments passed in. Use the syntax VARIABLE_NAME=VARIABLE_VALUE
#!/bin/bash

BIRTHDATE=$1
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Operating the Variables!

  • The user’s input string will be in the format of “2020–05–06”, we can convert the user’s birthdate to a Unix timestamp.
#!/bin/bash

BIRTHDATE=$(date -jf “%Y-%m-%d” $1 +%s)
NOW=$(date -jf “%a %b %d %T %Z %Y” “$(date)” +%s)

DIFF_IN_SECONDS=$(expr $NOW — $BIRTHDATE)
DIFF_IN_DAYS=$(expr $DIFF_IN_SECONDS / 86400)

echo "You are $DIFF_IN_DAYS days old."
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  • Breaking down, The $() tells Unix to execute the command surrounded by the parenthesis and replace the variable with the output of the command. This is called "command substitution".
  • Date: displays time on Unix systems!
  • -jf: Convert one date format to another
  • '%Y-%m-%d': Tells date that the input date string will be in the format of year-month-day!
  • $1: Specifies that the input string is the first argument of the script!
  • +%s: Tells date to output the date as the number of seconds that have passed since the “Unix epoch”.

  • The second line command: NOW=$(date -jf “%a %b %d %T %Z %Y” “$(date)” +%s) in this converted the current time into a Unix timestamp.

  • The third line command:DIFF_IN_SECONDS=$(expr $NOW — $BIRTHDATE) in this calculated the difference between the two dates in seconds. We can calculate the difference between the two timestamps by using "expr".

  • The fourth line command: DIFF_IN_DAYS=$(expr $DIFF_IN_SECONDS / 86400) then converted the difference in seconds to a difference in days by dividing the time difference in seconds by 86400. 86400 Seconds = 1 day.

  • The fifth line command: echo "You are $DIFF_IN_DAYS days old." used echo then to display the time difference!


Resources:

Bash Scripting Cheatsheet: https://devhints.io/bash
Bash Script examples: https://linuxhint.com/30_bash_script_examples/
Medium Blog: Bash Scripting (You need Premium subs to access this!)

Contact:

Got doubts? Contact me on Twitter.
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