Text-Message Gateways & Incrementing Bash Variable Daily - bash

Question

I have a bash script that is sending me a text daily, for 100 days.
#! /bin/bash
EMAIL="my-phone-gateway#address.net"
MESSAGE="message_content.txt"
mail $EMAIL < $MESSAGE
Using crontab, I can have the static $MESSAGE sent to me every day.
Other than hard-coding 100 days of texts ;)
How could I implement a variable counter such that I can have my texts say:
"Today is Day #1" on the first day, "Today is Day #2" on the second day, etc. ?
Note: The location of the requested text within the $MESSAGE file doesn't matter. Last line, first line, middle, etc.
The only requirement for an answer here is that I know what day it is relative to the first, where the first day is the day the script was started.
Of course, bonus awesome points for the cleanest, simplest, shortest solution :)

Answer 1

For our nightly build systems, I wrote a C program that does the calculation (using local proprietary libraries that store dates as a number of days since a reference date). Basically, given a (non-changing) reference date, it reports the number of days since the reference date. So, the cron script would have a hard-wired first day in it, and the program would report the number of days since then.
The big advantage of this system is that the reference date doesn't change (very often), so the script doesn't change (very often), and there are no external files to store information in.
There probably are ways to achieve the same effect with standard Unix tools, but I've not sat down and worked out the portable solution. I'd probably think it terms of using Perl. (The C program only works up to 2999 CE; I left a note in the code for people to contact me about 50 years before it becomes a problem for the Y3K fix. It is probably trivial.)
You could perhaps work in terms of Unix timestamps...
Create a script 'days_since 1234567890' which treats the number as the reference date, gets the current time stamp (from date with appropriate format specification; on Linux, date '+%s' would do that job, and it works on Mac OS X too), takes the difference and divides by 86,400 (the number of seconds in a day).
refdate=1234567890
bc <<EOF
scale=0
($(date '+%s') - $refdate) / 86400
EOF
An example:
$ timestamp 1234567890
1234567890 = Fri Feb 13 15:31:30 2009
$ timestamp
1330027280 = Thu Feb 23 12:01:20 2012
$ refdate=1234567890
$ bc <<EOF
> scale=0
> ($(date '+%s') - $refdate) / 86400
> EOF
1104
$
So, if the reference date was 13th Feb 2009, today is day 1104. (The program bc is the calculator; its name has nothing to do with Anno Domini or Before Christ. The program timestamp is another homebrew of mine that prints timestamps according to a format that can be specified; it is a specialized variant of date originally written in the days before date had the functionality, by which I mean in the early 1980s.)
In a Perl one-liner (assuming you specify the reference date in your script):
perl -e 'printf "%d\n", int((time - 1234567890)/ 86400)'
or:
days=$(perl -e 'printf "%d\n", int((time - 1234567890)/ 86400)')

Answer 2

The only way to accomplish this would be to store the date in a file, and read from that file each day. I would suggest storing the epoch time.
today=$(date +%s)
time_file="~/.first_time"
if [[ -f $time_file ]]; then
f_time=$(< "$time_file")
else
f_time=$today
echo "$f_time" > "$time_file"
fi
printf 'This is day: %s\n' "$((($today - $f_time) / 60 / 60 / 24))"

Answer 3

Considering that your script is running only once a day, something like this should work:
#!/bin/bash
EMAIL="my-phone-gateway#address.net"
MESSAGE="message_content.txt"
STFILE=/tmp/start.txt
start=0
[ -f $STFILE ] && start=$(<$STFILE)
start=$((start+1))
MESSAGE=${MESSAGE}$'\n'"Today is Day #${start}"
echo "$start" > $STFILE
mail $EMAIL < $MESSAGE

Answer 4

A simple answer would be to export the current value to an external file, and read that back in again later.
So, for example, make a file called "CurrentDay.dat" that has the number 1 in it.
Then, in your bash script, read in the number and increment it.
e.g. your bash script could be:
#!/bin/bash
#Your stuff here.
DayCounter=$(<CurrentDay.dat)
#Use the value of DayCounter (i.e. $DayCounter) in your message.
DayCounter=$((DayCounter + 1))
echo $DayCounter > CurrentDay.dat
Of course, you may need to implement some additional checks to avoid something going wrong, but that should work as is.