Resolved: How to assign a formatted date to a bash script variable

Question:

I’m trying to automate a script and I need to capture the abbreviated name of the previous month in a variable (e.g. in June, I need the variable to return May). I have the following script, but I’m having trouble assigning it to a variable:
date --date="$(date +%Y-%m-1)-1 month" +%b
Running the above returns ‘May’
But mo=date --date="$(date +%Y-%m-1)-1 month" +%b throws this error: -ksh: -ksh: not found [No such file or directory]
Thanks for any help.

Answer:

You need command substitution to capture the output of a command:

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