> How do I turn a unix date (like seconds since sometime in the past I > think) to something human readable? > > the date string is like 1088527745 > > and i /have/ read man date
A case where reading the man page isn't enough. Someone (I think from cosc) posted the trick to this a while ago. One has to know that the C library date/time structure and functions are supposed to handle out-of-range numbers by normalising them into something suitable. You use this to give only the seconds, and set all other fields to 0. You must take care of timezones as well. There's a script for this in my scriptutils package. The guts is this: date -u -d "70-1-1 0:0:$1" date -d "`date -u -d "70-1-1 0:0:$1"`" Volker PS And yes, we know it can be done in perl and python too. -- Volker Kuhlmann is possibly list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
