I have this:
date +"%H hours and %M minutes" I use festival to say it up.. but it says like: "zero nine hours".. I want it to say "nine hours"!
but date always give me 09... so I wonder if bash can easly make that become just 9?
in the complex script I tried like
printf %d 09 but it fails.. not octal :(
any idea?
In your case, you can simply disable zero padding by append - after % in the format string of date: %-H
By default, date pads numeric fields with zeroes. The following optional flags may follow '%':
-(hyphen) do not pad the field_(underscore) pad with spaces0(zero) pad with zeros^use upper case if possible#use opposite case if possible
See date manual
If you want to interpret number in different base, in bash
- Constants with a leading 0 are interpreted as octal numbers.
- A leading 0x or 0X denotes hexadecimal.
- Otherwise, numbers take the form [base#]n, where base is a decimal number between 2 and 64 representing the arithmetic base, and n is a number in that base
So, to interpret a number as decimal, use 10#n form, eg. 10#09
echo $((10#09*2)) 18 See Arithmetic Evaluation section of bash manual.
echo $((011)) $((10#011)) is another good example that outputs 9 11 lat=048 ; latd=${lat#0} ; echo $((latd-1)) works, but lat=-048 ; latd=${lat#0} ; echo $((latd-1)) doesn't. If you're trying to do comparisons in decimal with date values, I've found this method to be very effective:
let mymin=$(date '+1%M') ; let mymin=$mymin%100 That always yields a decimal value. So I can do this:
if [[ $mymin -le 1 ]]; then # only 0 and 1 are true. There's no problem with 08 or 09 this way. Using %10 instead of %100 gives you ten-minute ranges from 0 through 9. I also find the following gives decimal values, without leading zeros:
echo "$((10#$(date +%M)))" Portably, you can easily remove a leading 0 from a variable. This leaves the variable unchanged if there is no leading 0.
eval $(date +"h=%H m=%M") h=${h#0} m=${m#0} say "$h hours and $m minutes" In bash, ksh or zsh, you can use ksh's additional glob patterns to remove any number of leading 0s. In bash, run shopt -s extglob first. In zsh, run setopt kshglob first.
eval $(date +"h=%H m=%M") h=${h#+(0)} m=${m#+(0)} say "$h hours and $m minutes" 
In general in bash:
test ${#number} -eq 2 && number=${number#0} resulting in
date +"%H %M" | { read hours minutes hours=${hours#0} minutes=${minutes#0} echo "${hours} hours and ${minutes} minutes"; } Or, different:
date +"%H hours and %M minutes" | sed -n -e 's/0\([0-9]\)/\1/g' -e p I am surprised that date does not have appropriate format options.
