write a set of regular expressions tha regconise dates in normal text.
eg 12th February 2002, is a date, so is 03/02/2002, and so is 4
Mar'02. there are a lot of different ways dates can be recognised.
And use the egrep in linux

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Request for Question Clarification by coral-ga on 04 May 2003 14:04 PDT

There's thousands of ways to format dates; writing that regex properly
for you could take days upon days upon days.  Can you provide a list
of the date formats you'd most like recognized?  If so, I can write
the regex to those.

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Clarification of Question by kazami-ga on 04 May 2003 16:24 PDT

12th February 2002
31th Jan 2002
03/02/2002
22/02/01
4 Mar'02
3-4-2002
3-4-02
14122002
July 1, 1995

thanks

Here you go.  Tested compatible with egrep 2.5.1; it's too bad you
aren't using Perl, or this would look somewhat more readable :)  Were
you aware there's perl modules to handle this?  I'm available for
further work on this regex, if you'd like to understand it more fully
or improve it to support other dates; if interested, you should ask a
new question, referencing this question.

 - R.

((0?[1-9]|[1-2][0-9]|3[0-1])(st|nd|rd|th)?
+(Jan(uary)?|Feb(ruary)?|Mar(ch)?|Apr(il)?|May|Jun(e)?|Jul(y)?|Aug(ust)?|Sep(tember)?|Oct(ober)?|Nov(ember)?|Dec(ember)?)['
]+(19|20)?[0-9][0-9]|(0?[1-9]|1[0-2])[-/](0?[1-9]|[1-2][0-9]|3[0-1])[-/](19|20)?[0-9][0-9]|(0?[1-9]|[1-2][0-9]|3[0-1])[-/]([0-2][0-9]|3[0-1])[-/](19|20)?[0-9][0-9]|(0?[1-9]|[1-2][0-9]|3[0-1])([0-2][0-9]|3[0-1])(19|20)[0-9][0-9]|(Jan(uary)?|Feb(ruary)?|Mar(ch)?|Apr(il)?|May|Jun(e)?|Jul(y)?|Aug(ust)?|Sep(tember)?|Oct(ober)?|Nov(ember)?|Dec(ember)?)
+(0?[1-9]|[1-2][0-9]|3[0-1])(st|nd|rd|th)?(,)? +(19|20)[0-9][0-9])

Hrm.  Google wrapped it at the space characters, which breaks the
regex.  I've posted a copy of it at
http://www.crystalflame.net/ga-199033/regex.txt in case it was
corrupted by the web form here.
 
Usage: egrep "..." *.txt  # replace ... with the regex.