convert timestamp to formatted time OSX

Question

I had this working on Ubuntu but I'm now trying to run the script on OSX but it seems that the formatting of date is different.

Originally I had:

date -d "$MODDATE" +%F" "%H":"%M

where $MODDATE is a unix timestamp generated with stat

However the above date function doesn't work the same way on BSD versions. How can I convert the timestamp to the date in the following format: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM ?

Answer 1

You can use the command:

$ date -jf "<input format>" "<input value>" +"<output format>"

For example:

$ date -jf "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M" "2011-11-13 08:11:02" +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M"
2013-08-13 09:11

References

• How to convert a date string to the current time zone on the command line?
• date man page (osx)