A couple of scripting queries

From: Simon Hobson (simonsnews_at_thehobsons.codotuk)
Date: 03/24/05 

Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2005 18:59:45 +0000

I've been writing a script at work, mostly using Informix to extract some
data from the sales system - and I've come up with a couple of problems that
are new to me. Yes I'm sure they are bot a doddle in Perl - but I haven't
learned Perl (yet). This all runs in sh, not ksh, and will be executed
(indirectly) from cron.

1) 'double substitution' of variables

I need to repeat the same operation for the next 11 months, so I calculated
the start and end dates and stored them in variables S1 to S11 and E1 to E11
- thinking that I could then do something along the lines of :

  for month in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
  do
    echo "select <something> from <something>
          where date_required between \"${Sn}\" and \"${En}\" " \
    | dbaccess data -
  done

But then I realised that ${S${month}} doesn't work !

In the end I did this :

  for month in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
  do
    start=`echo 'echo "${S'${month}'}"' | /bin/sh`
    end=`echo 'echo "${E'${month}'}"' | /bin/sh`
    echo "select <something> from <something>
          where date_required between \"${start}\" and \"${end}\" " \
    | dbaccess data -
  done

I'm sure there must be a better way than start=`echo 'echo "${S'${month}'}"'
| /bin/sh` to do this - any ideas ?

2) date calculations

I suspect some of you might have seen this part coming ...

In the general case I need to process a whole pile of stuff for yesterdays
date (because the script will be run early in the morning). So I need to get
yesterdays date, and then the start and end dates for that month and the
following 11 months.

At the moment I've done this with a combination of some rather unpretty
script and informix scripts (which I'm too embarassed to quite here). Again
I'm sure there'll be a better way of doing it - any ideas ?

TIA, Simon

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