How do I convert an epoch timestamp to a human readable format on the cli? I think there's a way to do it with date but the syntax eludes me (other ways welcome).
On *BSD:
date -r 1234567890
On Linux (specifically, with GNU coreutils ≥5.3):
date -d @1234567890
With older versions of GNU date, you can calculate the relative difference to the UTC epoch:
date -d '1970-01-01 UTC + 1234567890 seconds'
If you need portability, you're out of luck. The only time you can format with a POSIX shell command (without doing the calculation yourself) line is the current time. In practice, Perl is often available:
perl -le 'print scalar localtime $ARGV[0]' 1234567890
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5+1 for the comment about the lack of portability (why doesn't the POSIX spec include a way to do this? grr) – Richard Hansen Feb 1 '12 at 22:50
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4What does the
@
mean indate -d @1234567890
?man date
made no reference to that... – Chris Markle Jan 14 '13 at 21:10 -
12@ChrisMarkle GNU man pages are often woefully incomplete. “The date string format is more complex than is easily documented here but is fully described in the info documentation.” To wit: gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/… – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Jan 14 '13 at 21:56
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3The
info date
is quite complete. The entry at28.9 Seconds since the Epoch
explains in detail about the @timestamp. – user79743 Feb 10 '16 at 8:31 -
date -d @1190000000
Replace 1190000000 with your epoch
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8
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If your epoch time is in milliseconds instead of seconds, remove the last three digits before passing it to date -d
:
$ date -d @1455086371603
Tue Nov 7 02:46:43 PST 48079 #Incorrect
This gives incorrect data. Remove the last three digits.
$ date -d @1455086371
Tue Feb 9 22:39:31 PST 2016 #Correct after removing the last three digits. You may remove and round off the last digit too.
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What utility prints included milliseconds (without a dot) ? – user79743 Feb 10 '16 at 8:35
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I have seen that WebLogic Application server mostly returns data time values with milliseconds and no dots when using scripting tool. e.g., lastSuccessfulConnectionUse=1455086371603 – KnockTurnAl Feb 10 '16 at 8:49
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I see. This page confirms Raw Time Value The timestamp in milliseconds. Thanks. – user79743 Feb 10 '16 at 10:11
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$ echo 1190000000 | perl -pe 's/(\d+)/localtime($1)/e'
Sun Sep 16 20:33:20 2007
This can come in handy for those applications which use epoch time in the logfiles:
$ tail -f /var/log/nagios/nagios.log | perl -pe 's/(\d+)/localtime($1)/e'
[Thu May 13 10:15:46 2010] EXTERNAL COMMAND: PROCESS_SERVICE_CHECK_RESULT;HOSTA;check_raid;0;check_raid.pl: OK (Unit 0 on Controller 0 is OK)
With bash-4.2
or above:
printf '%(%F %T)T\n' 1234567890
(where %F %T
is the strftime()
-type format)
That syntax is inspired from ksh93
.
In ksh93
however, the argument is taken as a date expression where various and hardly documented formats are supported.
For a Unix epoch time, the syntax in ksh93
is:
printf '%(%F %T)T\n' '#1234567890'
ksh93
however seems to use its own algorithm for the timezone and can get it wrong. For instance, in Britain, it was summer time all year in 1970, but:
$ TZ=Europe/London bash -c 'printf "%(%c)T\n" 0'
Thu 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 BST
$ TZ=Europe/London ksh93 -c 'printf "%(%c)T\n" "#0"'
Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970
Custom format with GNU date
:
date -d @1234567890 +'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'
Or with GNU awk
:
awk 'BEGIN { print strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", 1234567890); }'
Linked SO question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3249827/convert-from-unixtime-at-command-line
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4Only works for GNU date and GNU awk. Neither awk nor nawk support strftime. – user14755 Jul 28 '14 at 3:56
The two I frequently use are:
$ perl -leprint\ scalar\ localtime\ 1234567890
Sat Feb 14 00:31:30 2009
and
$ tclsh
% clock format 1234567890
Sa Feb 14 00:31:30 CET 2009
With zsh
you could use the strftime
builtin:
strftime format epochtime Output the date denoted by epochtime in the format specified.
e.g.
zmodload zsh/datetime
strftime '%A, %d %b %Y' 1234567890
Friday, 13 Feb 2009
There's also dateconv
from dateutils
:
dateconv -i '%s' -f '%A, %d %b %Y' 1234567890
Friday, 13 Feb 2009
keep in mind dateutils
tools default to UTC
(add -z your/timezone
if needed).
You could also use a little C program for printing the datetime in the format that can be directly parsed by shell
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <time.h>
int main(int argc, char * argv[]) {
if (argc==1) {
return 1;
}
struct tm input_tm;
char * formatStr = "YEAR=%Y\nMON=%m\nDAY=%d\nHOUR=%H\nMIN=%M\nSEC=%S";
size_t formatSize = strlen(formatStr) + 2;
char * output = (char *)malloc(sizeof(char)*formatSize);
strptime(argv[1],"%s",&input_tm);
strftime(output, formatSize, formatStr, &input_tm);
printf("%s\n",output);
free(output);
return 0;
}
usage:
#compile
clang -o epoch2datetime main.c
#invoke
eval `./epoch2datetime 1450196411`
echo $YEAR $MON $DAY $HOUR $MIN $SEC
#output
#2015 12 16 00 20 11
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Doesn't work on HP-UX:
./a.out 1599099168
YEAR=1901
MON=03
DAY=00
HOUR=2130568304
MIN=
– saulius2 Sep 3 '20 at 7:16
Wouldn't be a real solution without a little node.js:
epoch2date(){
node -p "new Date($1)"
}
add that to ~/.bash_aliases
and make sure its sourced in ~/.bashrc
with . ~/.bash_aliases
if [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then
. ~/.bash_aliases
fi
To get node on your system goto http://nvm.sh and run the curl command. It'll install node version manager (nvm) which allows you to switch versions of node.
Just type nvm ls-remote
and pick a version to nvm install <version>
.
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Does
node.js
run on HP-UX? Seemingly no: github.com/playnodeconf/ama/issues/10#issuecomment-211250773 – saulius2 Sep 3 '20 at 6:55
In PowerShell:
(([System.DateTimeOffset]::FromUnixTimeMilliSeconds($unixtime)).DateTime).ToString("s")
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This technique is using Microsoft .NET. It doesn't seem OP is looking for an MS solution. – user2320464 Sep 20 '19 at 20:40
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3
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@StephenKitt, but does
PowerShell
run on HP-UX? Seeming no: reddit.com/r/PowerShell/comments/8cx8dp/… . And this isunix.
– saulius2 Sep 3 '20 at 6:58 -
@saulius2 by that reasoning, most of the content of Unix.SE is invalid, because it’s possible to find a Unix system where it isn’t applicable. This is Unix & Linux Stack Exchange. – Stephen Kitt Sep 4 '20 at 6:54
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@StephenKitt, maybe it's so, I made no research about quality of the questions. But just by looking at the right side of this page I see three of them which are asking about the specific OS: unix.stackexchange.com/questions/86507/… unix.stackexchange.com/questions/96189/… unix.stackexchange.com/questions/434844/… – saulius2 Sep 5 '20 at 6:15