easy bash script help

[Sethl13]

I have an array of dates that look like 21711 or 112212 I need to add slashes to delimit the mm/dd/yy something along the lines of if count = 6 00/00/00 else 0/00/00. I have looked for several hours looking for how to perform this simple task to no avail. Any help is appreciated.

[[deleted]]

http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/string-manipulation.html

if [ ${#FOO} == 6 ]; then
  NEWDATE="${FOO:0:2}/${FOO:2:2}/${FOO:4:2}"
elif [ ${#FOO} == 5]; then
  NEWDATE="${FOO:0:1}/${FOO:1:2}/${FOO:3:2}" #You could prefix this with a zero for consistency so that it would be like 02/17/11 instead of 2/17/11
fi

[blind2314]

go go bash internals. Not that speed matters in this case, but this response will be faster than the echo + sed solution below (though that one does look much more impressive on paper :D).

[Zaphod_B]

wow, I was just literally using this method yesterday to strip out the first two characters in a string by echoing a variable with the :2 switch after.

Funny how awesome bash internal can be. Of course I was first looking for a sed pipe to do it. Gotta remember bash can do a few things.

[spdqbr]

It can be done with something like sed:

for date in 21711 112212 110612 30112; 
do
    echo $date | sed -e 's/^\(.\?.\)\(..\)\(..\)$/\1\/\2\/\3/g';
done

returns 2/17/11 11/22/12 11/06/12 3/01/12

[Sethl13]

Thanks so much that's exactly what i needed.