bug#6485: i have one question?

[Bob Proulx]

retitle 6485 Days Between Dates?  How?
thanks

upload amritsar wrote:
> can you plese tell me what is the procedure or command to find the days
> between two date

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Thanks!

> supoose we have 2 date first one 01-01-2008 second one 21-06-2010 then 
> how can we calculate days between these two date .

GNU date itself doesn't include any direct support for finding days
between dates.  But it can be used as part of a script to find this
information.  The technique is to convert each date to an integer
value such as a Julian Day Number or seconds of the Unix epoch and
then do take the difference and convert back.  I will use Unix seconds
in an example.  Plus the date must be in a format that can be parsed
by GNU date.

  date1="2008-01-01"
  date2="2010-06-21"
  date1seconds=$(date -d "$date1 12:00" +%s)
  date2seconds=$(date -d "$date2 12:00" +%s)
  totalseconds=$(( $date2seconds - $date1seconds))
  secondsperday=86400
  days=$(( $totalseconds / $secondsperday ))
  echo "There were $days days between $date1 and $date2"

And of course that can be shorted up considerably by applying the
constructs inline but I wanted to make things as illustrative as
possible and so expanded them out.

  $ echo Days between dates: $(( ( $(date -d "2010-06-21 12:00" +%s) - $(date 
-d "2008-01-01 12:00" +%s) ) / 86400 ))

I find it is often best to do date calculations using 12:00 noon so as
to avoid any daylight savings time issues.

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