Often you may want to increment dates in Bash.
You can use the following methods to do so:
Method 1: Increment Date Variable by One Day
next_date=$(date +%m-%d-%Y -d "$my_date + 1 day")
This particular example will create a new variable named next_date that increments the existing date in the my_date variable by one day.
Method 2: Increment Date in For Loop
for i in {0..10}
do
next_date=$(date +%m-%d-%Y -d "$my_date + $i day")
echo "$next_date"
done
This particular example increments the date in the existing my_date variable by one day and repeats the process 10 times using a for loop.
The following examples show how to use each method in practice.
Example 1: Increment Date Variable by One Day in Bash
Suppose that we create a date variable named my_date that contains the date 2024-08-22.
We can use the following syntax to create a new variable named new_date that increments this date by one day.
my_date=2024-08-22 next_date=$(date +%m-%d-%Y -d "$my_date + $1 day") echo $next_date
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that when we use the echo statement we can see that the date stored in the next_date variable is equal to 08-23-2024, which represents the date stored in the my_date variable incremented by one day.
Example 2: Increment Date in For Loop in Bash
Suppose that we create a date variable named my_date that contains the date 2024-08-22.
We can use the following syntax to increment this date by one day and use a for loop to repeat the process 10 times:
my_date=2024-08-22
for i in {0..10}
do
next_date=$(date +%m-%d-%Y -d "$my_date + $i day")
echo "$next_date"
done
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that this returns the date stored in the my_date variable along with the next 10 consecutive dates.
Related Tutorials
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in Bash:
How to Convert Timestamp to Date in Bash
How to Calculate Date Difference in Bash
How to Compare Dates in Bash
