I need a shell command or script that converts a Unix timestamp to a date. The input can come either from the first parameter or from stdin, allowing for the following usage patterns:
ts2date 1267619929
and
echo 1267619929 | ts2date
Both commands should output "Wed Mar 3 13:38:49 2010".
This question is related to
bash
date
unix-timestamp
In OSX, or BSD, there's an equivalent -r
flag which apparently takes a unix timestamp. Here's an example that runs date four times: once for the first date, to show what it is; one for the conversion to unix timestamp with %s
, and finally, one which, with -r
, converts what %s
provides back to a string.
$ date; date +%s; date -r `date +%s`
Tue Oct 24 16:27:42 CDT 2017
1508880462
Tue Oct 24 16:27:42 CDT 2017
At least, seems to work on my machine.
$ uname -a
Darwin XXX-XXXXXXXX 16.7.0 Darwin Kernel Version 16.7.0: Thu Jun 15 17:36:27 PDT 2017; root:xnu-3789.70.16~2/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64
Since Bash 4.2 you can use printf
's %(datefmt)T
format:
$ printf '%(%c)T\n' 1267619929
Wed 03 Mar 2010 01:38:49 PM CET
That's nice, because it's a shell builtin. The format for datefmt is a string accepted by strftime(3)
(see man 3 strftime
). Here %c
is:
%c
The preferred date and time representation for the current locale.
Now if you want a script that accepts an argument and, if none is provided, reads stdin, you can proceed as:
#!/bin/bash
if (($#)); then
printf '%(%c)T\n' "$@"
else
while read -r line; do
printf '%(%c)T\n' "$line"
done
fi
I use this when converting log files or monitoring them:
tail -f <log file> | gawk \
'{ printf strftime("%c", $1); for (i=2; i<NF; i++) printf $i " "; print $NF }'
some example:
$ date Tue Mar 22 16:47:06 CST 2016 $ date -d "Tue Mar 22 16:47:06 CST 2016" "+%s" 1458636426 $ date +%s 1458636453 $ date -d @1458636426 Tue Mar 22 16:47:06 CST 2016 $ date --date='@1458636426' Tue Mar 22 16:47:06 CST 2016
I had to convert timestamps inline in my bash history to make sense to me.
Maybe the following coming from an answer to How do I replace a substring by the output of a shell command with sed, awk or such? could be interesting to other readers too. Kudos for the original sed inline code go to @Gabriel.
cat ~/.bash_history | sed "s/^#\([0-9]\+\)$/echo -n '#'; date -u --d @\1 '\+\%Y-\%m-\%d \%T'/e" | less
In this answer I copy Dennis Williamson's answer and modify it slightly to allow a vast speed increase when piping a column of many timestamps to the script. For example, piping 1000 timestamps to the original script with xargs -n1 on my machine took 6.929s as opposed to 0.027s with this modified version:
#!/bin/bash
LANG=C
if [[ -z "$1" ]]
then
if [[ -p /dev/stdin ]] # input from a pipe
then
cat - | gawk '{ print strftime("%c", $1); }'
else
echo "No timestamp given." >&2
exit
fi
else
date -d @$1 +%c
fi
You can get formatted date from timestamp like this
date +'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S' -d "@timestamp"
While not pure bash, the following script will convert timestamps of length 13 in a string to their equivalent date in your local timezone using perl
#!/usr/bin/env bash
IT=$(cat /dev/stdin)
re='(.*)([0-9]{13})(.*)'
while [[ $IT =~ $re ]]; do
TIMESTAMP=${BASH_REMATCH[2]}
AS_DATE=$(echo "$TIMESTAMP" | perl -pe 's/([\d]{10})([\d]{3})/localtime $1/eg;')
IT="${IT/$TIMESTAMP/$AS_DATE}"
done
echo "$IT"
{"timestamp":"1573121629939","level":"DEBUG","thread":"http-nio-15372-exec-3","logger":"org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.method.annotation.RequestResponseBodyMethodProcessor"}
$ cat input | timestamp_to_date.sh
{"timestamp":"Thu Nov 7 06:13:49 2019","level":"DEBUG","thread":"http-nio-15372-exec-3","logger":"org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.method.annotation.RequestResponseBodyMethodProcessor"}
In PHP
$unix_time = 1256571985;
echo date("Y-m-d H:i:s",$unix_time)
You can use GNU date, for example,
$ sec=1267619929
$ date -d "UTC 1970-01-01 $sec secs"
or
$ date -ud @1267619929
date -r <number>
works for me on Mac OS X.
This version is similar to chiborg's answer, but it eliminates the need for the external tty
and cat
. It uses date
, but could just as easily use gawk
. You can change the shebang and replace the double square brackets with single ones and this will also run in sh
.
#!/bin/bash
LANG=C
if [[ -z "$1" ]]
then
if [[ -p /dev/stdin ]] # input from a pipe
then
read -r p
else
echo "No timestamp given." >&2
exit
fi
else
p=$1
fi
date -d "@$p" +%c
You can use this simple awk script:
#!/bin/gawk -f
{ print strftime("%c", $0); }
Sample usage:
$ echo '1098181096' | ./a.awk
Tue 19 Oct 2004 03:18:16 AM PDT
$
I have written a script that does this myself:
#!/bin/bash
LANG=C
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
if [ "$(tty)" = "not a tty" ]; then
p=`cat`;
else
echo "No timestamp given."
exit
fi
else
p=$1
fi
echo $p | gawk '{ print strftime("%c", $0); }'
I use this cross-platform one-liner:
date -d @1267619929 2>/dev/null || date -r 1267619929
It should work in both macOS and later versions of popular Linux distributions.
Source: Stackoverflow.com