Question

I want to convert a date like

Sat Dec 31 22:42:58 CET 2011

to a valid rss date which normaly looks like

Mon, 06 Sep 2009 16:45:00 +0000

Seconds should always be 00. Is there anyway to do so? Besides it would be could to find out the current as a valid rss but that’s optional 😉

Answer 1

Update

With your new sample input, you don’t even need to reformat. It’s as simple as

$ time="Sat Dec 31 22:42:58 CET 2011"; date -Rd "$time"
Sat, 31 Dec 2011 13:42:58 -0800

---

The trick is to reformat your date into a string that date can understand and take as input. In this case it is 2011-12-31 13:37. I’m using awk to do this, but there are number of different utilities that will suffice.

#!/bin/bash

time="12-31-11 13:37"
date -Rd "$(awk -F'[- ]' '{printf("20%s-%s-%s %s\n", $3,$1,$2,$4)}' <<<"$time")"

Output

$ time="12-31-11 13:37"; date -Rd "$(awk -F'[- ]' '{printf("20%s-%s-%s %s\n", $3,$1,$2,$4)}' <<<"$time")"
Sat, 31 Dec 2011 13:37:00 -0800