Parsing date and time data
Working with time-based data is often less than fun, especially when you're working with a lot of time-based content. But for our use cases, we often use date/time information for indexing; that is, to name our backup files and similar purposes. So, learning how to get information from the date command and putting that information into variables so that our code can be as modular as possible is very important. Let's create a shell script that we are going to be able to use in future scripts as a snippet of code for a lot of our shell scripts – at least bits and pieces of it.
Getting ready
We don't need any special utilities to be installed, just our Linux machine to be alive and ready for action.
How to do it…
We are going to go back to the basics and use the date command to extract all of the date and time pieces that we'll ever need:
- Information about the current time in terms of hours, minutes, and...
