Write a shell script to calculate the number of days after subtracting the two dates? using command line arguments.
This is what I have so far. I have just started working on shell scripting and have very less knowledge so far.Any help would be really appreciating.

#script to calculate the age
#take input from user in command line arguments as 20 04 1992 - 14 02 2014
#!/bin/bash

#checking if the date is correctly located in the following arguments

echo "$1 $2 $3 $4 $5 $6 $7"

#converting years into months after subtracting years.
months=$($1-$7)*($12))
#converting months to number of days in total.
days=$months+$(($2-$6)*$(31))

echo "Number of days are: $days"

-Homework Assignment Alert-

Ok, so what have you written so far?

I wrote. I used the command date, see man page or google ....

I have edited my question for better understanding.. Any help would be appreciated.

So, in your months = line you're subtracting the first parameter ($1) from the seventh parameter ($7) and then multiplying by the twelfth parameter ($12) which doesn't exist. So you're subtracting the birth day from the current year? That's not going to work is it?

You need to start again and get a better understanding of how parameters work before you even think about getting started on arithmetic.

The Advanced Bash Scripting Guide available from here: http://tldp.org/guides.html would be a good place to start reading.

1 members found this post helpful.

I wanted to subtract $1 and $7 and then multiply with 12. for conversion of years into months.
#converting years into months after subtracting years.
months=$(($1-$7)*(12))
#converting months into days
days=$months+$(($2-$6)*(31))
is this correct?
I simply want to get the difference of the two dates and convert into days.

I know what you are trying to get, and I'm also not going to do your homework for you.

What you should do is put this line in your script so it starts:The set -x will show you each line of your script as it's being run and with the parameters expanded.

So, if you're running your script with 20 04 1992 - 14 02 2014 That makes your parameters:
Your months= line is going to use 20 as $1, and 2014 as $7 then multiplying it by 12.

And then your days line is just going to totally compound your error.

Your calculations are fundamentally wrong, before you even get in to the scripting part of solving this problem.

1 members found this post helpful.

got it thanx

One of the easiest ways to solve this problem is to convert each of the dates into an integer value of seconds (based on the Unix epoch) subtract these and that'll give you the number of seconds difference between the two dates, then divide this by 86400 (60 (seconds) * 60 (minutes) * 24 (hours)) to give you the number of days.

As pan64 says in post #3 the date command is your friend

1 members found this post helpful.

but I cannot use date command because I need the output stepwise. like this
21 years 11 months 8 days
 263 months 8 days
 8015 days
that's y I was using all the arguments separately.

Which you've not mentioned until now, all you've asked for before is the number of days.

Anything else you've not told us yet?

I managed to calculate the number of days.Thankyou, i learned something atleast. And no nothing is left.