How can I generate Unix timestamps?

Question

Related question is "Datetime To Unix timestamp", but this question is more general.

I need Unix timestamps to solve my last question. My interests are Python, Ruby and Haskell, but other approaches are welcome.

What is the easiest way to generate Unix timestamps?

Answer 1

First of all, the Unix 'epoch' or zero-time is 1970-01-01 00:00:00Z (meaning midnight of 1st January 1970 in the Zulu or GMT or UTC time zone). A Unix time stamp is the number of seconds since that time - not accounting for leap seconds.

Generating the current time in Perl is rather easy:

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

Generating the time corresponding to a given date/time value is rather less easy. Logically, you use the strptime() function from POSIX. However, the Perl POSIX::strptime module (which is separate from the POSIX module) has the signature:

($sec, $min, $hour, $mday, $mon, $year, $wday, $yday) = 
                                     POSIX::strptime("string", "Format");

The function mktime in the POSIX module has the signature:

mktime(sec, min, hour, mday, mon, year, wday = 0, yday = 0, isdst = 0)

So, if you know the format of your data, you could write a variant on:

perl -MPOSIX -MPOSIX::strptime -e \
    'print mktime(POSIX::strptime("2009-07-30 04:30", "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M")), "\n"'

Answer 2

With NodeJS, just open a terminal and type:
node -e "console.log(new Date().getTime())" or node -e "console.log(Date.now())"

Answer 3

If you need a Unix timestamp from a shell script (Bourne family: sh, ksh, bash, zsh, ...), this should work on any Unix machine as unlike the other suggestions (perl, haskell, ruby, python, GNU date), it is based on a POSIX standard command and feature.

PATH=`getconf PATH` awk 'BEGIN {srand();print srand()}'