Environment variable as date STRING?

Question

$ date --version date (GNU coreutils) 8.25

When I pass a quoted string into date, the translation to epoch works fine, but when the quoted string is in an environment variable, no joy.

$ date --date "09/25/2016 12:31:52 AM" +%s
1474781512

$ echo $LAT
"09/25/2016 12:31:52 AM"

$ date --date $LAT +%s
date: extra operand ‘AM"’

$ date --date "$LAT" +%s
date: invalid date ‘"09/25/2016 12:31:52 AM"’

$ date --date '$LAT' +%s
date: invalid date ‘$LAT’

What am I doing wrong? (This isn't homework.)

Thanks.

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 25 '16 at 06:10

2

You have literal double quotes around the expanded variable ($LAT) value.

Either remove the double quotes at the time of declaration or use parameter expansion to remove at runtime:

date --date "${LAT//\"/}" '+%s'

answered Sep 25 '16 at 06:10

heemayl

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The (unshown) source of LAT put in the double quotes. Removing them at run-time did the trick. Thanks. – RonJohn Sep 25 '16 at 13:32

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 25 '16 at 06:10

0

You have quotes in your variable and that is causing the issues. You can see it here:

$ echo $LAT
"09/25/2016 12:31:52 AM"

If your variable had just the date it wouldn't show the quotes.

answered Sep 25 '16 at 06:10

Sami Kuhmonen

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The source of the LAT has the double-quotes. – RonJohn Sep 25 '16 at 13:29

Environment variable as date STRING?

2 Answers2