How can I generate Unix timestamps?

in Ruby:

>> Time.now.to_i
=> 1248933648

In Bash 5 there's a new variable:

echo $EPOCHSECONDS

Or if you want higher precision (in microseconds):

echo $EPOCHREALTIME

First of all, the Unix 'epoch' or zero-time is 1970-01-01 00:00:00Z (meaning midnight of 1st January 1970 in the Zulu or GMT or UTC time zone). A Unix time stamp is the number of seconds since that time - not accounting for leap seconds.

Generating the current time in Perl is rather easy:

perl -e 'print time, "\n"'

Generating the time corresponding to a given date/time value is rather less easy. Logically, you use the strptime() function from POSIX. However, the Perl POSIX::strptime module (which is separate from the POSIX module) has the signature:

($sec, $min, $hour, $mday, $mon, $year, $wday, $yday) = 
                                     POSIX::strptime("string", "Format");

The function mktime in the POSIX module has the signature:

mktime(sec, min, hour, mday, mon, year, wday = 0, yday = 0, isdst = 0)

So, if you know the format of your data, you could write a variant on:

perl -MPOSIX -MPOSIX::strptime -e \
    'print mktime(POSIX::strptime("2009-07-30 04:30", "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M")), "\n"'

Let's try JavaScript:

var t = Math.floor((new Date().getTime()) / 1000);

...or even nicer, the static approach:

var t = Math.floor(Date.now() / 1000);

In both cases I divide by 1000 to go from seconds to millis and I use Math.floor to only represent whole seconds that have passed (vs. rounding, which might round up to a whole second that hasn't passed yet).

If I want to print utc date time using date command I need to using -u argument with date command.

Example

date -u

Output

Fri Jun 14 09:00:42 UTC 2019

nawk:

$ nawk 'BEGIN{print srand()}'

• Works even on old versions of Solaris and probably other UNIX systems, where '''date +%s''' isn't implemented
• Doesn't work on Linux and other distros where the posix tools have been replaced with the GNU versions (nawk -> gawk etc.)
• Pretty unintuitive but definitelly amusing :-)

For Unix-like environment the following will work.

# Current UNIXTIME
unixtime() {
  datetime2unixtime "$(date -u +'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')"
}

# From DateTime（%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S）to UNIXTIME
datetime2unixtime() {
  set -- "${1%% *}" "${1##* }"
  set -- "${1%%-*}" "${1#*-}" "${2%%:*}" "${2#*:}"
  set -- "$1" "${2%%-*}" "${2#*-}" "$3" "${4%%:*}" "${4#*:}"
  set -- "$1" "${2#0}" "${3#0}" "${4#0}" "${5#0}" "${6#0}"
  [ "$2" -lt 3 ] && set -- $(( $1-1 )) $(( $2+12 )) "$3" "$4" "$5" "$6"
  set -- $(( (365*$1)+($1/4)-($1/100)+($1/400) )) "$2" "$3" "$4" "$5" "$6"
  set -- "$1" $(( (306*($2+1)/10)-428 )) "$3" "$4" "$5" "$6"
  set -- $(( ($1+$2+$3-719163)*86400+$4*3600+$5*60+$6 ))
  echo "$1"
}

# From UNIXTIME to DateTime format（%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S）
unixtime2datetime() {
  set -- $(( $1%86400 )) $(( $1/86400+719468 )) 146097 36524 1461
  set -- "$1" "$2" $(( $2-(($2+2+3*$2/$3)/$5)+($2-$2/$3)/$4-(($2+1)/$3) ))
  set -- "$1" "$2" $(( $3/365 ))
  set -- "$@" $(( $2-( (365*$3)+($3/4)-($3/100)+($3/400) ) ))
  set -- "$@" $(( ($4-($4+20)/50)/30 ))
  set -- "$@" $(( 12*$3+$5+2 ))
  set -- "$1" $(( $6/12 )) $(( $6%12+1 )) $(( $4-(30*$5+3*($5+4)/5-2)+1 ))
  set -- "$2" "$3" "$4" $(( $1/3600 )) $(( $1%3600 ))
  set -- "$1" "$2" "$3" "$4" $(( $5/60 )) $(( $5%60 ))
  printf "%04d-%02d-%02d %02d:%02d:%02d\n" "$@"
}

# Examples
unixtime # => Current UNIXTIME
date +%s # Linux command

datetime2unixtime "2020-07-01 09:03:13" # => 1593594193
date -u +%s --date "2020-07-01 09:03:13" # Linux command

unixtime2datetime "1593594193" # => 2020-07-01 09:03:13
date -u --date @1593594193 +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S" # Linux command

https://tech.io/snippet/a3dWEQY

With NodeJS, just open a terminal and type:
node -e "console.log(new Date().getTime())" or node -e "console.log(Date.now())"

In Rust:

use std::time::{SystemTime, UNIX_EPOCH};


fn main() {
    let now = SystemTime::now();
    println!("{}", now.duration_since(UNIX_EPOCH).unwrap().as_secs())
}