[PLUG] bash question

[Dean S. Messing]

 :: On Monday 19 August 2002 10:46, you wrote:
 :: > I'm writing a script where I want to figure out what month it will
 :: > be X weeks from today. If it were one week from today, I could use
 :: > date like this:
 :: >
 :: > date --date='+ 1 week' +%m
 :: >
 :: > This stores it to a variable (X):
 :: >
 :: > X=$(date --date='+ 1 week' +%m)
 :: >
 :: > But what if the 1 in the above statement is itself a variable?
 :: >
 :: > Y=1
 :: > X=$(date --date='+ $Y week' +%m)
 :: >
 :: > I get this error:
 :: >
 :: > date: invalid date `+ $Y week'
 :: >
 :: > How do I proceed here?
 :: 
 :: 
 ::  Try  $(Y) week
 :: 
 :: Marvin

Marvin, did you? (Try it, I mean)?

If it works I'd be mighty surpised since $(Y) will be just as enclosed
in quotes as $Y was.  Which means it won't expand.


<Rant on> I'd sure like to see people take the extra 5 seconds to
          actually test their proposed solutions instead if misleading
          people down dead-ends.  Especially when the proposed solution
          is trivially easy to test.  It is extremely frustrating to get
          17 solutions (as I did on another list with my recent xinerama
          problems) 16 of which were utterly useless, misleading,
          "solutions" from people who didn't even bother to read the
          problem statement fully.  (Thanks to the one or two who
          took the time to write a thoughtful answer.)

          It is actually better to not answer a question than to get a
          a non-sense answer that a newbie will believe as correct.
          He then tries it, bombs out, and says to his friends, "This
          Linux OS is a piece of hard-to-understand junk!"
<Rant off>


Bad morning.

Dean