I have a situation where something that works as a literal but doesn't work when reading from a text file. Here's the problem, simplified...
I have a text file ztest.txt consisting of one line... "August 14, 2021" ...and I have a script ztest consisting of... #!/bin/bash xtoday=$( date --date="August 14, 2021" +%F ) echo ${xtoday} read < ztest.txt echo "${REPLY}" xtoday=$( date --date="${REPLY}" +%F ) echo ${xtoday} Running the script produces three lines of output... 2021-08-14 "August 14, 2021" date: invalid date ‘"August 14, 2021"’ What am I doing wrong? -- I've seen things, you people wouldn't believe; Gopher, Netscape with frames, the first Browser Wars. Searching for pages with AltaVista, pop-up windows self-replicating, trying to uninstall RealPlayer. All those moments, will be lost in time like tears in rain... time to die.