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I'm trying to put the date an aws user was created into a more user friendly format in a CSV file using this command. I tried:

aws_user_friendly_date=$(date --date "$aws_user_create_date" '+%B %d\\, %Y') aws_user_friendly_date=$(date --date "$aws_user_create_date" '+%B %d\, %Y')

I want to comment out the comma, so it formats correctly in the CSV file.

But it doesn't work and I get this as the output:

AWS Account Creation Date: June 15\\, 2017 AWS Account Creation Date: June 15\, 2017

And if I leave the comma so that it's not escaped, the CSV file puts the year into it's own column. How can I show the escape the comma correctly so that it doesn't confuse a CSV file?

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    You don't escape delimiters in a csv, you encapsulate fields containing delimiters; usually with double quotes. So, in your CSV it will look like "AWS Account Creation Date: June 15, 2017" this isn't something your date command needs to worry about though. Instead worry about it when shoving this into your CSV. Commented Nov 6, 2018 at 16:09

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In many CSV dialects, a backslash is just a regular character, and doesn't escape anything. The way to put a literal comma in a field is to wrap the field value with double quotes.

aws_user_friendly_date=$(date --date "$aws_user_create_date" '+"%B %d, %Y"')

Probably a better design overall would be to store the date in proper machine-readable form, and convert it to human-readable friendly format only when you need to display it.

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