Get current time in seconds since the Epoch on Linux, Bash

Question

I need something simple like date, but in seconds since 1970 instead of the current date, hours, minutes, and seconds.

date doesn\'t seem t

Answer 1

This is an extension to what @pellucide has done, but for Macs:

To determine the number of seconds since epoch (Jan 1 1970) for any given date (e.g. Oct 21 1973)

$ date -j -f "%b %d %Y %T" "Oct 21 1973 00:00:00" "+%s"
120034800

Please note, that for completeness, I have added the time part to the format. The reason being is that date will take whatever date part you gave it and add the current time to the value provided. For example, if you execute the above command at 4:19PM, without the '00:00:00' part, it will add the time automatically. Such that "Oct 21 1973" will be parsed as "Oct 21 1973 16:19:00". That may not be what you want.

To convert your timestamp back to a date:

$ date -j -r 120034800
Sun Oct 21 00:00:00 PDT 1973

Apple's man page for the date implementation: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/date.1.html