[Popcon-developers] Bug#322261: popularity-contest: hints on translating time_t numbers to dates

[nathanst@ontko.com (Nathan Stratton Treadway)]

On Thu, Aug 11, 2005 at 03:14:24PM +0200, Bill Allombert wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 09, 2005 at 10:07:41PM -0500, Nathan Stratton Treadway wrote:
> > Package: popularity-contest
> > Version: 1.28
> > Severity: wishlist
> > 
> > 
> > I was interested in converting the atime and ctime "time_t" integers found
> > in my popularity contest reports into a human-readable date.  I eventually
> > ran across the "ctime()" function in Python's "time" module which did the
> > conversion I wanted, but I wasn't able to find any "simple" command line
> > utility that was able to convert in that direction.  
> > 
> > (For example, the "date" command's %s format directive will return the
> > time_t integer for the date being displayed, but the --date= option
> > doesn't seem to let me specify a date using the time_t integer.)
> 
> IMHO, this should rather be reported as a wishlist to the date utility.
> You can use 
> date -d "$((`date +%s` - $DATE )) seconds ago"

For what it's worth, I eventually found that the Info documentation for "date"
does contain a page of examples:
  info coreutiles "examples of date"

That page suggests using the following syntax to do the
time_t-to-readable conversion:
  date -d "1970-01-01 UTC 1139229934 seconds"

> perl -e 'print scalar localtime '$DATE',"\n"'
> where $DATE is the the date you want to convert.

Also good to know.  Thanks.

							Nathan
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