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



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