Bash script: difference in minutes between two times

Question

I have two time strings; eg. \"09:11\" and \"17:22\" on the same day (format is hh:mm). How do I calculate the time difference in minutes between these two?

Can the

Answer 1

Here is how I did it:

START=$(date +%s);
sleep 1; # Your stuff
END=$(date +%s);
echo $((END-START)) | awk '{printf "%d:%02d:%02d", $1/3600, ($1/60)%60, $1%60}'

Really simple, take the number of seconds at the start, then take the number of seconds at the end, and print the difference in minutes:seconds.