perl -e 'print time() . "\n"'

Friday, 13 February 2009 - 3:31pm by Steven M Scotten

1234567890

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Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 02/13/2009 - 15:55

Unmatched '

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Submitted by Steven M Scotten on Sun, 02/22/2009 - 20:53

perl -e 'print time() . "\n"'

Does that help?

Submitted by Dad on Wed, 02/18/2009 - 04:18

OK, I give up. What does this mean? I don't speak Perl, but that is weird syntax.....

Dad

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Submitted by Steven M Scotten on Sun, 02/22/2009 - 20:42

 

-e is a switch that tells perl to execute the following command rather than reading a file and executing that. print is the same as in other languages, time() is a function that returns the number of seconds since midnight Jan 1, 1970 UTC, the period is the concatenation operator, and \n is code for a newline character (which needs to be inside quotes so perl knows it's part of a string. Since time() is a function it will not be interpreted if inside quotes, which is why they need be concatenated.

February 13th 2009 at 3:31:30 (PST) was, by Unix time, 1234567890. There were parties and everything.

 

Submitted by squrcles on Fri, 02/26/2010 - 02:45

How would you convert this back to a human readable format?

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Submitted by Steven M Scotten on Tue, 03/02/2010 - 16:00

The value returned by that line can be used as input for a wide variety of functions in most programming languages. In Unix, the numeric value can be fed to the date command like so:

date -jr 1267574003

Which returns:

Tue Mar  2 15:53:23 PST 2010

Or it can be done all on one line like so:

date -jr `perl -e 'print time() . "\n"'`

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