Precise date display

[Paul Gold]

Is there any way of modifying the 'date' command to show tenths and hundredths of a second.

I have found the system calls ftime and gettimeofday but as our developer is only able to use shells cripts he would like to use the date command, format using .prec doesnt seem to give the desired results

any help appreciated

Paul Gold
CAST systems

[John Palmer]

Not as far as I know. The C library routines that 'date' uses have a minimum granularity of one second.

Regards,

John

[Andy Monks]

Paul, not according to the date man page.

Why not, write him a program that uses gettimeofday, and outputs what he wants. Then he can just call it from a shell script.

[Andreas Voss]

Sorry i see no chance to get more precision with the date command.
Think you have to write a little C program for that.

Regards

Andrew

[Andy Monks · Accepted solution]

Hi Paul,

It's raw, but will work from a script and I'm sure you could clean it up a bit. I'm sure he can cope with nanoseconds :-)

#include
#include
main()
{
struct timeval timenow;
struct timezone zonenow;

gettimeofday(&timenow, &zonenow);
printf("time %s",ctime(&timenow.tv_sec));
printf("nano %dn",timenow.tv_usec);
}

[Paul Gold]

thanks everyone]

Andy youre a star

Paul Gold
CAST systems