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linuxmacosdateshell
David Young
David Young

Reputation: 4743

How to convert DATE to UNIX TIMESTAMP in shell script on MacOS

On Linux you can convert a date like "2010-10-02" to a unix timestamp in shell script by

date -d "2010-10-02" "+%s"

Since Mac OS does not have the equivalent -d for date. How do you go about converting a date to a unix timestamp in a shell script.

Upvotes: 86

Views: 191467

Answers (8)

ma11hew28
ma11hew28

Reputation: 126367

To convert a date in UTC to a Unix timestamp:

date -ju -f "%F %T" "2021-03-08 14:56:21" "+%s"

Upvotes: 1

alex
alex

Reputation: 929

I wrote a set of scripts that provides a uniform interface for both BSD and GNU version of date.

Follow command will output the Epoch seconds for the date 2010-10-02, and it works with both BSD and GNU version of date.

$ xsh /date/convert "2010-10-02" "+%s"
1286020263

It's an equivalent of the command with GNU version of date:

date -d "2010-10-02" "+%s"

and also the command with BSD version of date:

date -j -f "%F" 2010-10-02 "+%s"

The scripts can be found at:

It's a part of a library called xsh-lib/core. To use them you need both repos xsh and xsh-lib/core, I list them below:

Upvotes: 0

vanyo
vanyo

Reputation: 41

date -j -f "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S" "2020-04-07 00:00:00" "+%s"

It will print the dynamic seconds when without %H:%M:%S and 00:00:00.

Upvotes: 4

Scott Prive
Scott Prive

Reputation: 889

Alternatively you can install GNU date like so:

  1. install Homebrew: https://brew.sh/
  2. brew install coreutils
  3. add to your bash_profile: alias date="/usr/local/bin/gdate"
  4. date +%s 1547838127

Comments saying Mac has to be "different" simply reveal the commenter is ignorant of the history of UNIX. macOS is based on BSD UNIX, which is way older than Linux. Linux essentially was a copy of other UNIX systems, and Linux decided to be "different" by adopting GNU tools instead of BSD tools. GNU tools are more user friendly, but they're not usually found on any *BSD system (just the way it is).

Really, if you spend most of your time in Linux, but have a Mac desktop, you probably want to make the Mac work like Linux. There's no sense in trying to remember two different sets of options, or scripting for the mac's BSD version of Bash, unless you are writing a utility that you want to run on both BSD and GNU/Linux shells.

Upvotes: 4

smarisetti
smarisetti

Reputation: 289

I used the following on Mac OSX. 

currDate=`date +%Y%m%d`
epochDate=$(date -j -f "%Y%m%d" "${currDate}" "+%s")

Upvotes: 4

JRiggles
JRiggles

Reputation: 1503

date +%s

This works fine for me on OS X Lion.

Upvotes: 143

user405725
user405725

Reputation:

date -j -f "%Y-%m-%d" "2010-10-02" "+%s"

Upvotes: 18

Lou Franco
Lou Franco

Reputation: 89172

man date on OSX has this example

date -j -f "%a %b %d %T %Z %Y" "`date`" "+%s"

Which I think does what you want.

You can use this for a specific date

date -j -f "%a %b %d %T %Z %Y" "Tue Sep 28 19:35:15 EDT 2010" "+%s"

Or use whatever format you want.

Upvotes: 45

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