bash Cookbook

Converting Epoch Seconds to Dates and Times

Problem

You need to convert Epoch seconds to a human-readable date and time.

Solution

Use the GNU date command with your desired format from Formatting Dates for Display:

EPOCH='1131173989'

$ date -d "1970-01-01 UTC $EPOCH seconds" +"%Y-%m-%d %T %z"
2005-11-05 01:59:49 -0500

$ date --utc --date "1970-01-01 $EPOCH seconds" +"%Y-%m-%d %T %z"
2005-11-05 06:59:49 +0000

Discussion

Since Epoch seconds are simply the number of seconds since the Epoch (which is Midnight on January 1, 1970, also known as 1970-01-01T00:00:00), this command starts at the Epoch, adds the Epoch seconds, and displays the date and time as you wish.

If you don’t have GNU date on your system you can try one of these Perl one-liners:

EPOCH='1131173989'

$ perl -e "print scalar(gmtime($EPOCH)), qq(\n);" # UTC
Sat Nov 5 06:59:49 2005

$ perl -e "print scalar(localtime($EPOCH)), qq(\n);" # Your local time
Sat Nov 5 01:59:49 2005

$ perl -e "use POSIX qw(strftime); print strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S',
localtime($EPOCH)), qq(\n);"
2005-11-05 01:59:49

See Also

• man date

• Formatting Dates for Display

• Converting Dates and Times to Epoch Seconds

• “Date and Time String Formatting with strftime” in Appendix A