formatting a string

[Carl Reynolds]

Steve Buehler wrote:

> I am writing a shell script (#!/bin/sh) that will change some file 
> names around but am having trouble formatting a string.  If I have a 
> string like this:
> 20050202
> How can I change it to:
> 2005-02-02
>
> I have about a thousand files so it isn't really feasable for me to be 
> changing the names manually.  All of the files are similar to this and 
> I have everything in the script to make the change but this one problem.
> I have looked into "printf" and "awk/split", but I don't think either 
> one of these would work for me.  Maybe one would, but I just couldn't 
> figure it out.  Any help would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks
> Steve
>
newname=`date -d $filename +"%Y-%m-%d"`