Comparison script.

Hi People,
I am new in shell scripting and I need help.
I have two strings :

Expected Dates: 12/17/2012 12/18/2012 12/19/2012 12/20/2012 12/21/2012 12/22/2012 12/23/2012
Eimx/MDW Dates: 12/17/2012 12/18/2012 12/19/2012 12/20/2012 12/21/2012 12/22/2012

I want to compare them and displaying the missing data.
( for example here is missing 12/23/2012)

I want to do a shell script for that.
Can you give me an idea please ? Thanks in advance for help.

Look at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/918886/split-string-based-on-delimiter-in-bash. It will show you how to split the data in to arrays.
Once you do that it become an exercise in looping through both arrays and comparing elements. If you need help with that search for bash array tutorials or examples.


If you can use common Linux commands instead of just bash then you could split it like above or with perl or awk one liners (search for that there are lots), dump both results into a file, sort it, and uniq it.