Get Yesterday's date in solaris

Question

I am running SunOS.

bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS lvsaishdc3in0001 5.10 Generic_142901-02 i86pc i386 i86pc

I need to find Yesterday's date in linux with the proper formatting passed from command prompt. When I tried like this on my shell prompt-

bash-3.00$ date --date='yesterday' '+%Y%m%d'
date: illegal option -- date=yesterday
usage:  date [-u] mmddHHMM[[cc]yy][.SS]
        date [-u] [+format]
        date -a [-]sss[.fff]

I always get date illegal option, why is it so? Is there anything wrong I am doing?

Update:-

bash-3.00$ date --version
date: illegal option -- version
usage:  date [-u] mmddHHMM[[cc]yy][.SS]
        date [-u] [+format]
        date -a [-]sss[.fff]

Answer 1

Try this below thing. It should work

YESTERDAY=`TZ=GMT+24 date +%Y%m%d`; echo $YESTERDAY

Answer 2

Try this one out:

DATE_STAMP=`TZ=GMT+24 date +%Y%m%d`

where GMT is the time zone and you might need to alter the 24 according to the hours difference you have from GMT. Either that or you can change GMT to a time zone more comfortable to you e.g. CST

Answer 3

As larsks suggested, you can use perl:

perl -e 'use POSIX qw(strftime); print strftime "%a %b %e %H:%M:%S %Y",localtime(time()- 3600*24);'

Slightly modified from

http://blog.rootshell.be/2006/05/04/solaris-yesterday-date/

To get YYYYMMDD format use this

perl -e 'use POSIX qw(strftime); print strftime "%Y%m%d",localtime(time()- 3600*24);'

This link explains how to format date and time with strftime

http://perltraining.com.au/tips/2009-02-26.html