Converting a UNIX timestamp to normal time

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You can, pretty easily, get a UNIX timestamp (time since the epoch, January 1, 1970, at 0:00:00), with date +%s. But how the heck do you do it in reverse? Given a timestamp like 1415744430, how do you convert that to a more conventional format?

My answer has always been “use a tool online”, or to pull up an interactive shell in something like Ruby. But there has to be a better way, right?

There is! But, it’s not standard.

On a Linux box (GNU coreutils)


$ date -d @1415744430
Tue Nov 11 22:20:30 UTC 2014

The leading @ is important.

On a Mac OS X box (BSD-derived)


$ date -r 1415744430
Tue Nov 11 17:20:30 EST 2014

So, there you have it, standardization be damned.

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