AWK confusion

[Patrick Wallek]

I am trying to do some mass conversions of epoch time, to m/d/y hh:mm:ss formatted time. I have acquired an awk script from the internet that converts epoch time (epoch_time.awk is attached to this thread).

The script works well when I run it from the command line and pass the epoch time string.

# ./epoch_time.awk 1168097143
20070106152543

My problem is that this is not working when I am trying to use it from within a for loop or while loop. Such as:

# for i in $(cat myfile)
do
./epoch_time.awk ${i}
done
19700101000000
19700101000000
19700101000000
19700101000000
19700101000000
19700101000000

# head myfile
"1017942629"
"1018292324"
"1023462896"
"1023463449"
"1023469166"

It makes no difference to epoch_time.awk if the values have quotes around them or not.

This may be a case of not being able to see the forest for the trees. But I am confused and can't see where the problem may lie.

Any help is appreciated.

[Patrick Wallek]

Hmmm....Let's try attaching that file again.....

epoch_time.awk hopefully attached this time.

[Duncan Edmonstone · Accepted solution]

Patrick,

its the double quotes - this works

for i in $(cat myfile | cut -d\" -f 2)
do
./epoch_time.awk ${i}
done

HTH

Duncan

[Peter Nikitka]

Hi,

of course is matters, whether your values in the file are quoted or not. Try

for i in $(do
eval ./epoch_time.awk ${i}
done

as a shortcut to eliminate the quotes.

mfG Peter

[Hein van den Heuvel]

It's the quotes. Strip them!

fwiw... I don't care for any scripts with hardcoded day tables. Yuck.

Cheers,
Hein.

[Patrick Wallek]

Well %$%#$%@$#%$#%!!!!!!!

I thought I tried stripping the quotes from the values in 'myfile'. Apparently not.

I guess what was throwing me off was that I had tried running the epoch_time.awk from the command line with the value quoted and it returned the correct value.

Live and learn.......

Thanks for pointing out what should've been fairly obvious.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

... and Patrick, why in the Wide World of Sports would you call an awk script for what is a one-liner in Perl using time() and localtime() or gmtime().

[Patrick Wallek]

Because I haven't found / taken / made the "time" to learn much Perl yet.

[Hein van den Heuvel]

Patrick..

On the live and learn...

May I finish that sentence with 'perl'

:-) :-)

You'll be in Vegas right?
We'll have a beer and i'll get you going on Perl :-)

perl -ne 'chomp;s/"//g;@t=localtime($_); printf ("%4d%02d%02d%02d%02d%02d\n", $t[5]+1900, $t[4]+1, $t[3], $t[2], $t[1], $t[0])' myfile

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Patrick:

A bit late I am, but even shorter with Perl:

# perl -MPOSIX -ne 'print strftime("%Y%m%d%H%M%S\n",localtime($_))' file

The nice part is that the directives to 'strftime' are as you find them in the manpages.

Regards!

...JRF...