Displaying seconds as days/hours/mins/seconds?

Question

Is it possible to easily format seconds as a human-readable time in bash?

I don't want to format it as a date, but as the number of days/hours/minutes, etc...

Answer 1

You can use something like this:

function displaytime {
  local T=$1
  local D=$((T/60/60/24))
  local H=$((T/60/60%24))
  local M=$((T/60%60))
  local S=$((T%60))
  [[ $D > 0 ]] && printf '%d days ' $D
  [[ $H > 0 ]] && printf '%d hours ' $H
  [[ $M > 0 ]] && printf '%d minutes ' $M
  [[ $D > 0 || $H > 0 || $M > 0 ]] && printf 'and '
  printf '%d seconds\n' $S
}

Examples:

$ displaytime 11617
3 hours 13 minutes and 37 seconds
$ displaytime 42
42 seconds
$ displaytime 666
11 minutes and 6 seconds

Answer 2

date --date '@1005454800' gives you Sun Nov 11 00:00:00 EST 2001, which is 1005454800 seconds after the Unix epoch. You can format that with the date +FORMAT option.