Unix time to human readable?

Date12 Dec 2010 ContentComments

You can quickly convert Unix time to a human readable format by using the date command. This proves to be very helpful for bash scripts etc when you don’t feel like calling out to Perl.

Quick example:

root@localhost [/]# date -d @1290705757
Thu Nov 25 18:22:37 CET 2010

You can also format the output of date to suit your needs, for example:

root@localhost [/]# date -d@1290705757 +"%H:%M:%S %d/%m/%Y"
18:22:37 25/11/2010

As expect this can very easily be scripted for example I was checking create times on some cPanel accounts:

root@localhost [/var/cpanel/users]# for user in *; do echo -n "$user: "; date -d@$(grep STARTDATE $user | cut -d’=’ -f2); done
damian: Thu Nov 18 21:17:44 CET 2010
test: Mon Nov 8 00:01:04 CET 2010
bob: Mon Nov 15 17:34:18 CET 2010

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