Hello,

Can you please help me find/display out last Friday's date of the month using command in Unix/Linux

This seems like a homework question, so I'll hint at the answer. Look at the man page of date. Read the descriptions of the -d argument and the +format.

there is no such command, you need to implement it, for example in perl using localtime

I tried with date --date with below strings
'2 friday' #This show 2 friday from now
'last friday' #This shows previous firday of month

but this is not showing what i want....

Last Friday's date of the month:

$ date --date='last friday' +%d
15

Very cool; for those who are interested, see the OP's thread here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...1#post12567241

So, I think this is what was wanted:

We'll see what the OP says.

Per the LQ Rules, please do not post homework assignments verbatim. We're happy to assist if you have specific questions or have hit a stumbling point, however. Let us know what you've already tried and what references you have used (including class notes, books, and Google searches) and we'll do our best to help. Also, keep in mind that your instructor might also be an LQ member.

02-28-2013

Well it has been well over a day since the original post so I have a question for all contributors to this thread. I'm not totally clear what the OP is after but what about the "cal" command? The entire present month is displayed like a calendar and it's easy to see what the date was last Friday. ?? Comments? Am I way off base here?

Judging by what the OP wrote in the Ubuntu thread that was also started, I assume that what was wanted was a command that would output the date of the final Friday of the current month. In that thread, the OP wrote, "The output date should be 29 march...." I'm guessing that that he didn't want something like echo "29 march", and that simply looking at a calendar wouldn't do, either.

I had read the problem as the day of the month for "last Friday", instead of the date of the final Friday of the month. Incidentally, "last Friday" is a valid argument for the -d argument.

Being able to clearly express a problem requires a student to first organize his thoughts. This could even lead to a solution. Maybe, for these homework problems, we should ask the original posters to restate the problem clearly and unambiguously if the description is muddled, and then to provide information on what they tried, or a description on how they believe they need to proceed to solve the problem.

This also works for me

cal 03 2013 | awk 'NR==1 {m=substr($1, 1, 3); y=$2} NF>5 {d=$6} END {print "Friday", m, d, y}'