Home/ Questions/Q 915295
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-15T17:51:50+00:00

Is there a quick, one-liner way to convert a Unix timestamp to a date

  • 0

Is there a quick, one-liner way to convert a Unix timestamp to a date from the Unix command line?

date might work, except it’s rather awkward to specify each element (month, day, year, hour, etc.), and I can’t figure out how to get it to work properly. It seems like there might be an easier way — am I missing something?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    With date from GNU coreutils you can do:

    date -d "@$TIMESTAMP"

    # date -d @0
Wed Dec 31 19:00:00 EST 1969

    (From: BASH: Convert Unix Timestamp to a Date)

    On OS X, use date -r.

    date -r "$TIMESTAMP"

    Alternatively, use strftime(). It’s not available directly from the shell, but you can access it via gawk. The %c specifier displays the timestamp in a locale-dependent manner.

    echo "$TIMESTAMP" | gawk '{print strftime("%c", $0)}'

    # echo 0 | gawk '{print strftime("%c", $0)}'
Wed 31 Dec 1969 07:00:00 PM EST
    • 0