Looping with an specific step in a long datetime string in bash - bash

Question

I have a list of files with the substring YYYYMMDDHH in them (example: 2016112200 means 2016 November 22th at 00 hours). These files are: temp_2016102200.data, temp_2016102212.data, temp_2016102300.data, temp_2016102312.data, ..., temp_20170301.data. And I also have other family of files substituting temp by wind.
For each string YYYYMMDDHH I want to create a tar with the temp and its correspondent wind file. I don't want this process to stop if one or both files are missing.
My idea was to loop from 12 hours to 12 hours, but I am having some problems because to specify the date I did: b=$(date -d '2016111400' +'%Y%m%d%H') but bash informs me that that is not a valid date...
Thanks.

Answer 1

It's not bash telling you the date format is wrong: date is telling you. Not everything you type is a bash command.
As Kamil comments, you have to split it up so that date can parse it. The YYYY-mm-dd HH:MM:SS format is parsable. Using bash parameter expansion to extract the relevant substrings:
$ d=2016111400
$ date -d "${d:0:4}-${d:4:2}-${d:6:2} ${d:8:2}:00:00"
Mon Nov 14 00:00:00 EST 2016
Now, when you want to add 12 hours, you have to be careful to do it in the right place in the datetime string: if you add a + character after the time, it will be parsed as a timezone offset, so put the relative part either first or between the date and the time.
$ date -d "+12 hours ${d:0:4}-${d:4:2}-${d:6:2} ${d:8:2}:00:00"
Mon Nov 14 12:00:00 EST 2016
As a loop, you could do:
d=2016111400
for ((i=1; i<=10; i++)); do
# print this datetime
date -d "${d:0:4}-${d:4:2}-${d:6:2} ${d:8:2}:00:00"
# add 12 hours
d=$( date -d "+12 hours ${d:0:4}-${d:4:2}-${d:6:2} ${d:8:2}:00:00" "+%Y%m%d%H" )
done
outputs:
Mon Nov 14 00:00:00 EST 2016
Mon Nov 14 12:00:00 EST 2016
Tue Nov 15 00:00:00 EST 2016
Tue Nov 15 12:00:00 EST 2016
Wed Nov 16 00:00:00 EST 2016
Wed Nov 16 12:00:00 EST 2016
Thu Nov 17 00:00:00 EST 2016
Thu Nov 17 12:00:00 EST 2016
Fri Nov 18 00:00:00 EST 2016
Fri Nov 18 12:00:00 EST 2016
OK, a "nicer" way to loop
start=2019043000
end=2019050300
plus12hours() {
local d=$1
date -d "+12 hours ${d:0:4}-${d:4:2}-${d:6:2} ${d:8:2}:00:00" "+%Y%m%d%H"
}
for (( d = start; d <= end; d = $(plus12hours "$d") )); do
printf "%d\t%s\n" "$d" "$(date -d "${d:0:4}-${d:4:2}-${d:6:2} ${d:8:2}:00:00")"
done
2019043000 Tue Apr 30 00:00:00 EDT 2019
2019043012 Tue Apr 30 12:00:00 EDT 2019
2019050100 Wed May 1 00:00:00 EDT 2019
2019050112 Wed May 1 12:00:00 EDT 2019
2019050200 Thu May 2 00:00:00 EDT 2019
2019050212 Thu May 2 12:00:00 EDT 2019
2019050300 Fri May 3 00:00:00 EDT 2019