Converting dates in AWK

Question

I have a file containing many columns of text, including a timestamp along the lines of Fri Jan 02 18:23 and I need to convert that date into MM/DD/YYYY H

Answer 1

you can try this. Assuming just the date you specified is in the file

awk '
{
    cmd ="date \"+%m/%d/%Y %H:%M\" -d \""$1" "$2" "$3" "$4"\""
    cmd | getline var
    print var
    close(cmd)
}' file

output

$ ./shell.sh
01/02/2010 18:23

and if you are not using GNU tools, like if you are in Solaris for example, use nawk

nawk 'BEGIN{
   m=split("Jan|Feb|Mar|Apr|May|Jun|Jul|Aug|Sep|Oct|Nov|Dec",d,"|")
   for(o=1;o<=m;o++){
      months[d[o]]=sprintf("%02d",o)
   }
   cmd="date +%Y"
   cmd|getline yr
   close(cmd)
}
{
    day=$3
    mth=months[$2]
    print mth"/"day"/"yr" "$4
} ' file