[ILUG] Bash script misbehaving

[Kieran Tully]

On 2008-08-08, Proinnsias Breathnach <proinnsias at project-bob.org> wrote:

> However, what is line 37 doing / trying to do? - as you say, it sounds
> like it's trying to parse it as octal. (based on the error message)

Yes, it would be useful to see line 37!

I ran into this exact issue in a bash script where
 printf %0.2d $MONTH
was being used to pad single digit months with leading zeroes.

As $MONTH was already padded it was interpreted as octal.
The solution was to use month in a string context, i.e.
 printf %s $MONTH

(obviously the printf was doing more than this, or we could have used echo).
-- 
Kieran Tully, Software Developer and Tenor, http://ktully.net