data validation for date data type in unix ?

Question

for eg if i m getting various inputs from keyboard ie Book accession number, Subject code Book_id ,
Author ,
Year of Publication, Title of the book, Publisher’s name, Price,

and i want do validations such that

year of publication must be before 1996, Book_id must be unique, Publisher, Author and the title of the Book cannot be entered blank, Subject code can only be either UNIX or C, The Book accession numbers must be in ascending order,

how do i store all values first and do validations for data types like date

Answer 1

I guess it would make more sense to put this stuff in to a database. Then create a select. In shell programming it's also posible, but would create a lot of work and it could get a bad performance.

Answer 2

using perl is another good option. since it has date modules in it and its faster. if you dont have db access.