Hi, Martin Klier wrote: > Hi Linux Admins, > > is there a command to get something like "thrid friday of july" or "second > wednesday each month"? I crossread the manuals for date and gcal, but it > seems to be impossible. Next thing I found was gcal, with > "--period-of-fixed-dates", but I have not been able to get useful results, > and > date -d "35 tuesday" (35th tuesday of a year), but I have not been able to > limit it to months nor selecting the year (by the way, I do not need it). > > Has somebody experience with this one, and can you give me a hint where to > look, or even an example? > > Thanks a lot in advance, I love the --date GNU extension, but I tried a number of different syntaxes to get it to do what you wanted without any luck. So I thought a one line pipe would be fun: cal 7 2007 | awk -F. 'NR > 2{print substr($1,5*3+1,2)}' | grep '[0-9]' | awk 'NR == 3 {print $1}' You set the day you're interested in through the first integer of the second parameter of the substr call of the awk command. 0=Sunday (0*3+1), 1=Monday (1*3+1) etc. You set the week number with the 'NR == n' part of the final awk. You set the month and year with the parameters to cal. It invokes awk twice which if used in a very tight loop could be a problem. It would be easy to merge the awk | grep | awk into one awk command, but it starts to look more like program code on a single line rather than a series of simple(-ish) commands. Cheers Adam - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-admin" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html