So I'm working as an IT intern this summer and I'm a bit over my head with some of the coding stuff, any help would be greatly appreciated.

I have a file of dates and times which is delimited by spaces, and looks something like this:

And ultimately it will be cast to an array and compared with another file which has matching times and dates, however those same dates are formatted like so:

I believe this can be done using awk, and I tried tweaking some code I found around the internet for similar purposes.

I'm not worried about how to code it to go through and check which month, then find the proper number, etc. I know I can do that with a long and probably messy if-else statement. But how do I actually convert the string into the number?

Have a look at those two places.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1...a-month-string
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1...-integer-shell