Question

I have the following command that returns a date from a file

tail -1 MyFile | awk -F ',' '{print $7}'

Returns date like this 04/16/12 20:44:19

I want to convert that date to epoch time by modifying the awk command somehow by feeding $7 into date -d $7 +%s

Answer 1

I think awk is a bit heavy for this job, cut maybe a little bit lighter:

tail -1 MyFile | date -d "`cut -d, -f7`" +%s

But of course you can do it with awk as well:

tail -1 MyFile | date -d "`awk -F, '{ print $7 }'`" +%s