how to recursively generate a date column

Today a dear friend of mine needed to add a column to some files she was analyzing getting them out of the mess of MS excel and inside the thin and nice gnuplot. 

The date column required a nice format : gg/mm/yy:hh.mm

So she asked me to spend a couple of min to help her in a dirty and quick way which follows:

• First of all I thought to generate epoch of the starting date and last one so to deal with seconds and easily increment them of a fixed amounf (3600sec = 1hour)

START=`date -d "12/6/2005 16:00" +%s`

LAST=`date -d "12/31/2006 16:00" +%s`;echo $LAST

DELTA=3600

• then generate the dates in epoch and convert in the desired format from cmd line 

for ((i=$START; i<=$LAST; i+=$DELTA)); do date -d @$i +%d/%m/%Y:%H.%M;done >dates.dat

• check if the lenght is the same as data file with wc
• Last to merge with the data file 

paste dates.dat data.dat >final.dat

hope this could be helpful 

alex 

http://lxphotostudio.mine.nu