title: Comparing 2 dates in bash
body: <p>So I am trying to compare 2 dates in bash , but my dates contains characters like Jan or Monday .
  Can I compare them directly or do i need to format them like this &quot;20201607&quot;(and how do i do this plz) and them numerically compare them?
  Thank you
  For example:</p>
  <pre><code>today=$(date)
  day='21 Jan 2021'
  
  if [ $today &lt; $day ]
     echo &quot;$day&quot;
  </code></pre>
  <p>basically my function will just return the dates who does not happened atm.</p>