How can I get the time in seconds from the command line.

[Luis Montañés]

??Is the command date capable to do it?

[Robin Wakefield]

Hi,

I'd use perl:

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

rgds, Robin

[A. Clay Stephenson]

This is about as easy as it gets:

NSECONDS=$(perl -e 'print scalar time')
echo "Epoch seconds = ${NSECONDS}"

[Ian Lochray]

Do you mean the number of seconds since midnight, th enumber of seconds this year or the number of seconds A.D.?

[Chris Vail]

If you want to know how long it took the computer to do something, execute the comand with 'timex'.
Example: Try 'timex ioscan -fnC disk' for starters, and compare with 'timex ioscan -funC disk'. The first time (without the u argument to the ioscan) it took 16.64 seconds on one of my systems. With the u command, it took 0.18 seconds. The difference is that the -u argument read the disk configuration from memory, while the command without it actually caused the system to go out and see what disks it actually had.
We use timex here to check on how fast our backups are going.

Chris

[Jose Mosquera]

Hi,

#HOUR=`date +%H`
#echo $HOUR
#MINUTES=`date +%M`
#echo $MINUTES
SECONDS=`date +%S`
#echo $SECONDS

-or once sintax -

#date +%H:%M:%S


Rgds.