Question: how to subtract date in unix shell script?
Answer: 4 Answers. The easiest way is to convert the date to a unix time_t value (i.e. seconds since the beginning of the epoch, or '1-1-1970 00:00:00'), and then substract 30 days * 86400 seconds per day from that number. e.g. the following example uses set -x so that you can see the value of the D variable as it changes.