linux - Using `date` command to get previous, current and next month

Question

I am using below to get previous, current and the next month under Ubuntu 11.04:

LAST_MONTH=`date +'%m' -d 'last month'`
NEXT_MONTH=`date +'%m' -d 'next month'`
THIS_MONTH=`date +'%m' -d 'now'`

It works well until today, the last day of October, 2012 (2012-10-31)

I get below result as of now:

$ date
Wed Oct 31 15:35:26 PDT 2012
$ date +'%m' -d 'last month'
10
$ date +'%m' -d 'now'
10
$ $ date +'%m' -d 'next month'
12

I suppose the outputs should be 9,10,11 respectively.

Don't understand why date outputs behave like this. What should be a good way to get consistant previous, current and next month instead?

Answer 1

The problem is that date takes your request quite literally and tries to use a date of 31st September (being 31st October minus one month) and then because that doesn't exist it moves to the next day which does. The date documentation (from info date) has the following advice:

The fuzz in units can cause problems with relative items. For example, `2003-07-31 -1 month' might evaluate to 2003-07-01, because 2003-06-31 is an invalid date. To determine the previous month more reliably, you can ask for the month before the 15th of the current month. For example:

 $ date -R
 Thu, 31 Jul 2003 13:02:39 -0700
 $ date --date='-1 month' +'Last month was %B?'
 Last month was July?
 $ date --date="$(date +%Y-%m-15) -1 month" +'Last month was %B!'
 Last month was June!