Edward J. Sabol writes on 9 October 1997 at 18:20:24
Excerpts from mail: (09-Oct-97) Incrementing a counter by Bill Moseley
TODAY=`date '+%m%y%d'`
Instead of forking a `date' process, I suggest parsing the date from the
From_ header. (Warning: I don't think all From_ headers look exactly the
same, so you should test this first.)
[...]
Alan Stebbens' <aks(_at_)sgi(_dot_)com> procmail library has a date.rc module
which you may find useful. You can get the entire library from
http://reality.sgi.com/aks/depot/mail/procmail/procmail-lib.shar
Here's some of the commentary from date.rc
Dan
------------------- message is author's opinion only ------------------
J. Daniel Smith <DanS(_at_)bristol(_dot_)com>
http://www.bristol.com/~DanS
Bristol Technology B.V. +31 33 450 50 50, ...51 (FAX)
Amersfoort, The Netherlands {info,jobs}(_at_)bristol(_dot_)com
-----
# Procmail recipe to extract and create some variables related to
# the date in the message. If the message has no date reference,
# either the variables are returned undefined, or set using the
# current date depending upon DATE_DEFAULT_NOW.
# Currently, this recipe file parses dates with these formats:
#
# 1. Tue(sday), 31 Dec 96
# 2. Tue, 31 Dec 1996
# 3. 12/31/96
# 4. Tuesday, December 31, 1996
#
# If DATE is not defined, then obtain the date from the current input message
# from the following headers, in decreasing priority: Resent-Date:, Date:,
# and "From ".
#
# If DATE is defined, it is simply used as the input.
#
# Thus to parse the date from the current mail message do this:
#
# DATE INCLUDERC=date.rc
#
# To make this even easier, use "get-date.rc":
#
# INCLUDERC=get-date.rc
#
# To parse a given date string, simply set DATE:
#
# DATE=12/31/96 INCLUDERC=date.rc
#
#
# These variables are set from the parsing of DATE:
#
# DATE # the original, complete date string from which
# # all other variables were derived
# [...cut...]
#
# These variables are used within date.rc but will not return
# meaningful values.
#
# DAYS_RE MONTHS_RE S Y N NN APM ZONE X D