Question

I am trying to use the date command in Terminal on multiple Mac OS X machines that are synced via NTP to synchronize some code in a program. Essentially I am running a program…

MyProgram with arguments[date]

I can get date to give me the seconds since the Unix epoch with the %M specifier.

When I try to use %N to get nanosecond resolution, date just returns N. Is there anyway to get date to give me finer then second resolution? I wouldn’t even mind passing two arguments such as

(date +%M):arg2

And then converting units in the program.

Many thanks in advance!

%N specifier listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_(Unix)

Answer 1

Per man date on Mac OS X 10.5, date on MacOSX doesn’t appear to go beyond seconds-resolution. You can get fractions of a second with other included tools such as Python or Perl, e.g.

$ python -c'import time; print repr(time.time())'
1269148775.3234861