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20021231: radiosonde display of current and previous day

>From: Sridharareddy Duggireddy <address@hidden>
>Organization: USF
>Keywords: 200212311713.gBVHDKt19823 McIDAS UAPLOT

Shridhara,

>   I am trying to display the radiosonde display. I have to display the
>current and previous day's skew-T observations using UAPLOT. In that
>command I have to enter previous day's date in order to display previous
>day's image. can you please tell me how to display the previous day's date
>in linux?

The GNU version of 'date' on Linux allows you to list out the date value
contained in a STRING.  Here is the top part of the man page for date:

% man date

DATE(1)                        FSF                        DATE(1)

NAME
       date - print or set the system date and time

SYNOPSIS
       date [OPTION]... [+FORMAT]
       date [-u|--utc|--universal] [MMDDhhmm[[CC]YY][.ss]]

DESCRIPTION
       Display  the  current time in the given FORMAT, or set the
       system date.

       -d, --date=STRING
              display time described by STRING, not `now'

 ...

This allows you to list the date for 'yesterday':

% date -d yesterday
Mon Dec 30 11:38:49 MST 2002

As you can see from the man page, 'date' allows you to format the
output in a variety of ways.

McIDAS understands a variety of formats for date and time. The McIDAS
command ARGHELP will list out those formats that are recognized.
Here are the acceptable formats for dates in McIDAS:

ARGHELP DATE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Valid McIDAS date argument format:
   [+-]yyyyddd , [+-]yyyy/mm/dd , [+-]mm/dd , [+-]dd/mon/yyyy , [+-]dd/mon ,
                 [+-]yyyy-mm-dd , [+-]mm-dd , [+-]dd-mon-yyyy , [+-]dd-mon

   where:  yyyy = year           (def=current year & century)
           mm   = month          (def=current month)
           mon  = calendar month (>=3 chars)
           dd   = day of month   (required)
           ddd  = day of year    (required)
           '/'  = today's date

Acceptable Forms:  [+-]yyyy/mm/dd  , [+-]mm/dd  , [+-]/mm/dd  , [+-]yyyyddd ,
                   [+-]dd/mon/yyyy , [+-]dd/mon , [+-]dd/mon/ , [+-]ddd     ,
           [+-]/ , [+-]/dd         , [+-]dd/    , [+-]//dd    , [+-]dd//
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So, you have your choice of how to format the output from 'date' into a
form that McIDAS will understand.  For instance, if you wanted the date
to be represented by the century, year, and Julian day [YYYYDDD], you
would do the following:

% date -d yesterday +%Y%j
2002364

If you wanted the format YYYY/MM/DD, you would use:

% date -d yesterday +%Y/%m/%d
2002/12/30

etc.

The last thing you need to worry about is Universal Coordinated Time (UTC).
Since dates/times in McIDAS are always specified in UTC, you need to
tell 'date' to do its calculation using UTC.  This is done by including
the '-u' flag:

date -u -d yesterday +%Y%j
date -u -d yesterday +%Y/%m/%d

and so on.

Check out the man page for date on your Linux system for more information.

Tom