unix -- get number of business days

calendar, date, unix

Solution

This can make it:

cal -h | cut -c 4-17 | tail -n +3  | wc -w

Explanation

`cal` shows line on columns of 4 characters. `-h` turns off highlighting of today.

     April 2014       
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa  
       1  2  3  4  5  
 6  7  8  9 10 11 12  
13 14 15 16 17 18 19  
20 21 22 23 24 25 26  
27 28 29 30

Since Sunday is first column and Saturday the last one, it is a matter of extracting the numbers in between character 4 and 17:

$ cal -h | cut -c 4-17 
  April 2014  
Mo Tu We Th Fr
    1  2  3  4
 7  8  9 10 11
14 15 16 17 18
21 22 23 24 25
28 29 30

And then remove the two first lines:

$ cal -h | cut -c 4-17 | tail -n +3  
    1  2  3  4
 7  8  9 10 11
14 15 16 17 18
21 22 23 24 25
28 29 30

And then count the number of words:

$ cal -h | cut -c 4-17 | tail -n +3  | wc -w
22

Problem

I'm using AIX with the ksh. I'm trying to calculate the number of business days in a month. I was trying to use AWK but I'm hung up now. Here's what I've got so far: ``` cal | awk '{print $2, $3, $4, $5, $6} | awk 'NR > 2' ``` Here's the normal output (for current date/time) for cal: ``` April 2014 Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 ``` Here's what I'm getting with that script: ``` 2 3 4 5 7 8 9 10 11 14 15 16 17 18 21 22 23 24 25 28 29 30 ``` My plan is to, in the end, read these lines into a c program and output the total weekdays (right now we're not worried about holidays on normal business days). As you can see here, since the 3rd line of output is only 5 columns itself, it's dropping the 1st business day of that week. Maybe I'm going about this whole thing wrong -- if there's another way to do this on the Unix operating system or through C: I have no sentimental attachment to "cal" and "awk" (not yet anyway).

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