I love COBOL. This is exactly the approach I would use, and do use in
programs. And we just had traffic on how to do this with Pure MPE. Of
course, you knew that, since you contributed some rather useful examples
of how to do so elegantly. For our needs here, I will likely use the
latter in some job streams and XEQs.

But, none of those are within the parameters given to me by the UNIXary
who asked me. Andreas Schmidt and Steve Barrett provided a brute force
means using shell scripting. Mark Bixby made an excellent case for using
perl under those circumstances, even going above and beyond the call of
duty by providing some shell scripting to prove the point, while being
otherwise occupied. I believe the UNIXary knows awk, but not perl per
se, thus the shell only requirement, but was persuaded that perl would
do the trick. Thanks, Lars, for your well made point, and thanks to
Andreas, Steve, and Mark for their help.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Lars Appel [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Wednesday, August 05, 1998 4:16 PM
> To:   [log in to unmask]
> Subject:      Re: [HP3000-L] shell scripts for date calcs
>
> Too sad that COBOL isn't allowed in this contest (even if it would
> proably satisfy the MPE, Unix, NT availability requirement easily).
>
> Otherwise I'd probably try something based on FUNCTION
> INTEGER_OF_DATE,
> ADD x TO y and FUNCTION DATE_OF_INTEGER (using $CONTROL POST85) ...
>
> ;-) Lars