On 07/07/2024 20:46, Richard Neill wrote:
Hello,
I've noticed a lot of systems now return the timestamp in milliseconds
since the epoch, rather than seconds. This means that e.g.
date --date='@1720378861258'
will do something rather unexpected!
May I suggest that it would be nice if date had an input format that
would let me specify that the value is in ms?
I know we can bodge it with bc, or by injecting the decimal, or trimming
off the last 3 chars, but that seems inelegant, and requires extra
thinking (and hence bugs) from the programmer.
date --date='@1720378861.258'
Perhaps one of these syntaxes might be suitable?
date --date='@ms1720378861258'
date --date='@@1720378861258'
date --epoch-ms --date='@1720378861258'
Yes this has some merit, but given we can leverage numfmt
to convert / round, I'm not sure it's warranted. Consider for e.g.:
$ ms2date() { date --date=@$(numfmt --to-unit=1K --round=nearest "$1"); } $
ms2date 1720378861999
Sun 07 Jul 2024 20:01:02 IST
cheers,
Pádraig
