Convert unix epoch time to human readable date on Mac OSX - BSD

bash date unix epoch
Nehal Shah picture Nehal Shah · Feb 22, 2014 · Viewed 39.7k times · Source

On my Mac OSX, my bash script has a epoch time 123439819723. I am able to convert the date to human readable format by date -r 123439819723 which gives me Fri Aug 26 09:48:43 EST 5881.

But I want the date to be in mm/ddd/yyyy:hh:mi:ss format. The date --date option doesn't work on my machine.

Answer

mike.dld picture mike.dld · Feb 22, 2014

Here you go:

# date -r 123439819723 '+%m/%d/%Y:%H:%M:%S'
08/26/5881:17:48:43

In a bash script you could have something like this:

if [[ "$OSTYPE" == "linux-gnu"* ]]; then
  dayOfWeek=$(date --date @1599032939 +"%A")
  dateString=$(date --date @1599032939 +"%m/%d/%Y:%H:%M:%S")
elif [[ "$OSTYPE" == "darwin"* ]]; then
  dayOfWeek=$(date -r 1599032939 +%A)
  dateString=$(date -r 1599032939 +%m/%d/%Y:%H:%M:%S)
fi

Related questions

Get the date (a day before current time) in Bash

How can I print the date which is a day before current time in Bash?

Read More
Print a file's last modified date in Bash

I can't seem to find how to print out the date of a file. I'm so far able to print out all the files in a directory, but I need to print out the dates with it. I know I …

Read More
How to convert strings like "19-FEB-12" to epoch date in UNIX

In UNIX how to convert to epoch milliseconds date strings like: 19-FEB-12 16-FEB-12 05-AUG-09 I need this to compare these dates with the current time on the server.

Read More