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Asked: 2026-05-26T16:53:28+00:00

In the same spirit as discussed here , is there a recommended way to

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In the same spirit as discussed here, is there a recommended way to generate / parse dates from within a bash script so that it can be interfaced to Javascript Date?

To be precise, I get this strings when doing json encoding of a Javascript Date object:

2011-10-31T10:23:47.278Z

I could put together a bash hack to generate / parse that date format, but I would prefer to avoid reinventing the wheel. Does somebody have a working solution?

I am more interested in the “generating” side: I want to generate current dates from a bash script and save them in a json document (couchdb) so that they can be automatically ordered by the view engine.

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  1. Editorial Team

    The closest I am coming is this:

    date -u +"%FT%T.000Z"

    Which gives this output:

    2011-11-03T06:43:08.000Z

    I do not like that I have to put the T, the Z and the milliseconds to 0 manually (I can use %N for nanoseconds, and truncate with sed or whatever, but seems like overkill just to get millisecond precission), and I was hoping that there would be a built-in format token for date which would produce that UTC date. I assumed – wrongly it seems – that the format is common enough that it can be specified with just one format token.

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