Alain Kelder is a Giant Dork…

Shell one liner to produce a delimited file with massive number of date ranges

A project I’m working required a comma delimited file containing date ranges, in one week increments, from July 1987 to the present. That’s 1166 week ranges. What sounds like a potentially time consuming ordeal, takes about 10 sec to produce with the following shell one liner:

for n in $(seq 0 1166); \
do echo -e \
$(date +%m/%d/%Y --date="1987-07-01 +$n week")","\
$(date +%m/%d/%Y --date="1987-07-01 +$n week +6 day") \
>> date.ranges; done

The result:

07/01/1987,07/07/1987
07/08/1987,07/14/1987
07/15/1987,07/21/1987
...
10/21/2009,10/27/2009
10/28/2009,11/03/2009
11/04/2009,11/10/2009