Neat trick for getting relative dates in a Linux shell script

I wanted to get the SVN updates done in the last 24 hours for a nightly script that updates and restarts one of our applications. The command would look something like:

svn log -v -r {#Calculate yesterday's date somehow }:{#Calculate today's date in yyyy-mm-dd format}

Getting today's date is easy enough using the "+" parameter with a format string, but yesterday's date seemed more tricky; checking the man page for the date command didn't look very promising. It looked like I'd have to do the famous programming exercise of keeping an array of the number of days in each month, checking whether yesterday was still this month or last month, etc. etc.

However, using info date instead of man date gave a lot more information, including this very useful option:

-d DATESTR'
`--date=DATESTR'
Display the date and time specified in DATESTR instead of the
current date and time. DATESTR can be in almost any common
format.

DATESTR can be a word or phrase like "tomorrow" "yesterday", "last week", etc. So my problem was solved in a single line:

svn log -v -r {`date -d "yesterday" +"%Y-%m-%d"`}:{`date +"%Y-%m-%d"`}

Moral of the story - always look at the info page as well as the man page !