Hi!
I'm attempting to convert dates from one format to another: From e.g. "October 29, 2005" to 2005-10-29. I have a list of 625 dates. I use Awk.
The conversion works -- most of the time. Hovewer, sometimes the conversion won't happen at all, and the variable supposed to hold the (converted) date remains undefined.
This always happens with the exact same rows. Running `date' explicitly (from the Bash shell) on the dates of those weird rows works fine (the dates are properly converted). -- It's not the textual contents of those rows that matters.
Why this behavior, and how can I fix my script?
Her it is:
awk 'BEGIN { FS = "unused" } {
x = "undefined";
"date \"+%Y-%m-%d\" -d " $1 | getline x ;
print $1 " = " x
}' uBXr0r15.txt \
> bug-out-3.txt
If you want to reproduce this problem:
- Download this file: uBXr0r15.txt.
- Run the Awk skript.
- Search for "undefined" in bug-out-3.txt.
("undefined" found 122 times, on my computer.)
Then you could run the script again, and (on my computer) bug-out-3.txt remains unchanged -- exactly the same dates are left undefined.
(Gawk version 3.1.6, Ubuntu 9.10.)
Kind regards, Magnus