Convert epoch date output from command result to human readable

Question

I've been trying to nut this out, but I'm stumped... I've tried to extrapolate the commands I found at How to replace epoch timestamps in a file with other formats?, but I'm can't get it yet.

My system has a command to read values from a database, one of the values I can read is in epoch time format:

[user@Dreadnaught config]# dbviewer -t Isagraf5.Resource._1.CompileDate
1488303650

If I manually copy the result to the date command, it works fine:

[user@Dreadnaught config]$ date -d@1488303650
Tue Feb 28 17:40:50 UTC 2017

I want to get this as a single command (so I can just add it to my alias list instead of having to load a sh script). I've tried all sorts of ways to pipe the result from the first command to the second, but I can't figure it out. What am I missing?

From the other referenced question, I've managed to join the result from the dbviwer query onto the date command, but not execute it.

[user@Dreadnaught config]$ dbviewer -t Isagraf5.Resource._1.CompileDate | sed 's/^//; s/\([0-9]\{10\}\)/date -d @\1/;s/$//'
date -d @1488303650
[user@Dreadnaught config]$ . dbviewer -t Isagraf5.Resource._1.CompileDate | sed 's/^//; s/\([0-9]\{10\}\)/date -d @\1/;s/$//'
-ash: /usr/bin/dbviewer: line 1: syntax error: unexpected "("

Thanks for your help...

Answer 1

alias dbdate='date -d@"$( dbviewer -t Isagraf5.Resource._1.CompileDate )"'

You should now be able to use dbdate as an alias for

date -d@"$( dbviewer -t Isagraf5.Resource._1.CompileDate )"

This command will run dbviewer -t Isagraf5.Resource._1.CompileDate and call date with its output inserted after the @.

$(...) is a command substitution. It will be substituted by the output of the command inside the $(...).