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Asked: 2026-05-10T23:32:07+00:00

I’m looking for an easy way to track time I work on a project

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I’m looking for an easy way to track time I work on a project using the command line. I do

echo '$(date) : Start' >>worktime.txt

When I start working and

echo '$(date) : End' >>worktime.txt

When I stop working. The result is a file of the form:

kent@rat:~/work$ cat worktime.txt  Fri Jan  2 19:17:13 CET 2009 : Start Fri Jan  2 19:47:18 CET 2009 : End Fri Jan  2 21:41:07 CET 2009 : Start Fri Jan  2 22:39:24 CET 2009 : End

‘Start’ and ‘End’ are meant as descriptions and could have been any other text. It is certain that every odd line contains a start date and time before : and every even line contains an end date and time.

What I would like to do is sum up my worked time by parsing the text file using bash, tr, sed, awk and the other common Unix/Linux tools. I prefer using this approach instead of using Python, Perl, Haskell, Java etc.

All ideas welcome!

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1 Answer

  1. wilhelmtell has a great script, if you need to use a slightly modified version so that you can continue to use $(date) instead of $(date +%s) this will work in an identical fashion, just with an added line to reformat the times using +%s

    #!/bin/bash total=0 while read LINE; do   d1=$(echo $LINE |cut -c1-28);   t1=$(date -d '$d1' +%s);   read LINE   d2=$(echo $LINE |cut -c1-28);   t2=$(date -d '$d2' +%s);   total=$(($total+$t2-$t1)); done echo $(($total/(60*60))) hours
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