Quickly calculate date differences

Question

I often want to make some quick date calculations, such as:

• What is the difference between these two dates?
• What is the date n weeks after this other date?

I usually open a calendar and count the days, but I think there should be a program/script that I can use to do these kinds of calculations. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

The "n weeks after a date" is easy with GNU date(1):

$ date -d 'now + 3 weeks'
Tue Dec  6 23:58:04 EST 2011
$ date -d 'Aug 4 + 3 weeks'
Thu Aug 25 00:00:00 EST 2011
$ date -d 'Jan 1 1982 + 11 weeks'
Fri Mar 19 00:00:00 EST 1982

I don't know of a simple way to calculate the difference between two dates, but you can wrap a little logic around date(1) with a shell function.

datediff() {
    d1=$(date -d "$1" +%s)
    d2=$(date -d "$2" +%s)
    echo $(( (d1 - d2) / 86400 )) days
}
$ datediff '1 Nov' '1 Aug'
91 days

Swap d1 and d2 if you want the date calculation the other way, or get a bit fancier to make it not matter. Furthermore, in case there is a non-DST to DST transition in the interval, one of the days will be only 23 hours long; you can compensate by adding ½ day to the sum.

echo $(( (((d1-d2) > 0 ? (d1-d2) : (d2-d1)) + 43200) / 86400 )) days

Answer 2

A python example for calculating the number of days I've walked the planet:

$ python
>>> from datetime import date as D
>>> print (D.today() - D(1980, 6, 14)).days
11476

Answer 3

I usually prefer having the time/date in unix utime format (number of seconds since the epoch, when the seventies begun, UTC). That way it always boils down to plain subtraction or addition of seconds.

The problem the usually becomes transforming a date/time into this format.

If you have GNU date, you can get it with date '+%s' At the time of writing, the current time is 1321358027.

To compare with 2011-11-04 (my birthday), date '+%s' -d 2011-11-04, yielding 1320361200. Subtract: expr 1321358027 - 1320361200 gives 996827 seconds, which is expr 996827 / 86400 = 11 days ago.

The problem is converting from utime (1320361200 format) into a date. I don't know of a readily available tool to do this, but it's very simple to do in for instance C or perl.

Answer 4

For a set of portable tools try my very own dateutils. Your two examples would boil down to one-liners:

ddiff 2011-11-15 2012-04-11
=>
  148

or in weeks and days:

ddiff 2011-11-15 2012-04-11 -f '%w %d'
=>
  21 1

and

dadd 2011-11-15 21w
=>
  2012-04-10

Answer 5

I frequently use SQL for date calculations. For example MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQLite:

bash-4.2$ mysql <<< "select datediff(current_date,'1980-06-14')"
datediff(current_date,'1980-06-14')
11477

bash-4.2$ psql <<< "select current_date-'1980-06-14'"
 ?column? 
----------
    11477
(1 row)

bash-4.2$ sqlite2 <<< "select julianday('now')-julianday('1980-06-14');"
11477.3524537035

Other times I just feel in mood for JavaScript. For example SpiderMonkey, WebKit, Seed or Node.js:

bash-4.2$ js -e 'print((new Date()-new Date(1980,5,14))/1000/60/60/24)'
11477.477526192131

bash-4.2$ jsc-1 -e 'print((new Date()-new Date(1980,5,14))/1000/60/60/24)'
11477.47757960648

bash-4.2$ seed -e '(new Date()-new Date(1980,5,14))/1000/60/60/24'
11477.4776318287

bash-4.2$ node -pe '(new Date()-new Date(1980,5,14))/1000/60/60/24'
11624.520061481482

(Watch out when passing the month to the JavaScript Date object's constructor. Starts with 0.)