Printing only the first field in a string
You can do this easily with a variety of Unix tools:
$ cut -d' ' -f1 <<< "12/12/2013 14:32"12/12/2013$ awk '{print $1}' <<< "12/12/2013 14:32"12/12/2013$ sed 's/ .*//' <<< "12/12/2013 14:32"12/12/2013$ grep -o "^\S\+" <<< "12/12/2013 14:32"12/12/2013$ perl -lane 'print $F[0]' <<< "12/12/2013 14:32"12/12/2013
If your date string is stored in a variable, then you don't need to run an external program like cut, awk or sed, because modern shells like bash can perform string manipulation directly which is more efficient.
For example, in bash:
$ s="1/10/2013 23:41"$ echo "${s% *}"1/10/2013