Get UTC time in seconds

Question

It looks like I can t manage to get the bash UTC date in second  I m in Sydney so   10hours UTC time   date  Thu Jul 3 17 28 19 WST 2014   date -u  Thu Jul 3 07 28 20 UTC 2014   But when I tried to convert it  I m getting the same result which is not UTC time   date   s  1404372514   date -u   s  1404372515   What am I missing here     After getting an answer saying date   s was returning UTC time  here are more details about the problem I m facing now   I m trying to compare a date written in a file with python  This date is written in seconds in UTC time  And the bash date   s doesn t give me the same one  Actually if I m doing in python time asctime time localtime date in seconds from bash    I get the current time of Sydney  not UTC  I don t understand

User · Answer

I bet this is what was intended as a result     date -u --date  1404372514 Thu Jul  3 07 28 34 UTC 2014

User · Answer

One might consider adding this line to    bash profile  or similar  in order to can quickly get the current UTC both as current time and as seconds since the epoch     alias utc  date -u  amp  amp  date -u   s

User · Answer

I believe   s is seconds since epoch  It s timezone invariant

User · Answer

You say you re using   time asctime time localtime date in seconds from bash     where date in seconds from bash is presumably the output of date   s   The time localtime function  as the name implies  gives you local time   If you want UTC  use time gmtime   rather than time localtime     As JamesNoonan33 s answer says  the output of date   s is timezone invariant  so date   s is exactly equivalent to date -u  s  It prints the number of seconds since the  epoch   which is 1970-01-01 00 00 00 UTC  The output you show in your question is entirely consistent with that   date -u Thu Jul 3 07 28 20 UTC 2014  date   s 1404372514     14 seconds after  date -u  command  date -u   s 1404372515     15 seconds after  date -u  command

[bash] Get UTC time in seconds

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