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Sorry for the lame question

How many minutes have passed since the Unix Epoch ? It should be January 1, 1970 ?

Let's say approximately until 1 Jan 2011... 5 865 696 000 minutes ?

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3 Answers

up vote 8 down vote accepted 
#!/bin/bash

# Minutes since Epoch until now:
((minutes=$(date +%s)/60))

# Minutes since Epoch until Jan 1 2011:
((minutes=$(date -d 'Jan 1 2011' +%s)/60))
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The %s in date +%s is a GNU extension. Other implementations typically allow the same format strings as in strftime(3), which mostly don't have %s. And WHY do everybody assume bash availability? – MattBianco Mar 31 '11 at 6:41
Does this take leap seconds into account? – mattdm♦ Mar 31 '11 at 15:51
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@mattdm> From info date... %s "...Leap seconds are not counted unless leap second support is available." ... %S "second ('00'...60'). This may be '60' if leap seconds are supported." ... I can only assume that it would include those seconds in a total of 'seconds-since-epoch' when the support is available. – Peter.O Mar 31 '11 at 16:20
Cool, thanks. GNU thinks of everything. :) – mattdm♦ Mar 31 '11 at 17:02
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@mattbianco 1) i didn't necessarily "assume" bash availability. I provided my solution using bash. It doesn't have to be accepted by @patrick as the answer and you can provide your own solution. 2) When discussing Linux, it's almost certain that bash is available. I'd put my guess at about 99.9% likely given any random selection of Linux installations. 3) I use OSX and %s is available in BSD's date even though, in general, it's a significantly command than GNU's date. – nix Apr 1 '11 at 14:53
up vote 2 down vote

If you've got Python installed then you can run this:

python -c "import time; print time.time() / 60"
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up vote 1 down vote

You can check the online version of Unix Epoch: Epoch Converter. You can get the current Epoch value and also convert time back to epoch

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