> i'm not sure what your particular problem domain is since you don't say
True. Strftime is a red herring (sorry), I can use and "date" | getline to generate pretty much any date string I need. The issue is more going the other way. tm2sec in awk is quite complex and hids many pitfalls if you want to do it correctly. My problem is parsing logfiles which contain dates in the form of date(1) / ctime(2). I want to graph stuff over time and so I want a monotonically incrementing number (secs sinc 1/1/70 would be ideal). I have coded this in awk but for one year leap years break - though not by much. This is why I was asking if there was an external app called somthing like tm2sec which calls its eponomymous library function. it seems there isn't one and its the work of 30secs to write one, no problem, I just thought there was one but I had forgotten its name... -Steve
