I am looking for a unix script that will calculate a date in the past and also accounts for past months and year. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Need more information. Give an example on how you want it to work.

I want the script to calculate a date in the past, say 7 days, and then delete certain files based on that date. My problem is that I don't know how to account for going back to the previous month or year. Between May 1st-7th, how do I calculate 7 days before (a date in April) and delete files created on that date?

I had a similar problem once. There may be a better way to approach it, but think about the following: 1) you know the maximum days in each month. feb=28, apr,jun,sept,nov=30, all others=31 2) The logic would be something like this. test for currentday =< 7 get current month = MON case $MON in 2) maxdays=28;; 4|6|9|11) maxdays=30;; *) maxdays=31;; esac You should be able to do the calculation to get the day in the previous month.

I assume you're trying to delete files that have not been modified for n days? This would remove files in /myhome/logs that are named *.log and haven't been modified for 7 days or more. find /myhome/logs -type f ! -mtime -7 -name '*.log' -exec rm {} \;

Thanks for your help! Using both of your suggestions, I waa able to create the script I need.