Is there a unix program to convert various HH:MM:SS formats to seconds?

Question

I have a flat file with data in the following format

(1+01:01)
(06:18)
(00:02)

I can use awk to sum up the data if it's in the form of seconds like so

16
32
64

cat file | awk '{SUM+=$1} END {print SUM}'

Is there a way I can convert the values stored in the flat file to seconds?

Can you give a sample `date` command to convert `1+01:01` to seconds? — user784637, Feb 22 '13 at 07:29
`gawk` has [date/time functions](http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Time-Functions.html) which may be of interest to you. If you just want to calculate seconds, why don't you just multiply it out. Exactly what is your expected output? What is `1+01:01`? — Steve, Feb 22 '13 at 07:30
I can multiply it out, I was just wondering if there were any built in tools to do it =) — user784637, Feb 22 '13 at 07:31

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 22 '13 at 08:52

GNU date is pretty good at parsing dates, but 1+01:01 is not supported. You could still use it if you let sed modify the input a little bit, and assuming it means 1 hour + 1 hour + 1 minute.

Here's is one way you could parse the file with GNU grep, sed and date:

<infile grep -o '[^()]*' | 
sed 's/^([0-9]+)[+-]/\1 hour /; 
     s/^/date -d "/; 
     s/$/ 1970-01-01 UTC" +%s/e'

Output:

7260
22680
120

Leave of the e flag to see what commands sed is executing.

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:18

1

Why not use awk for this as well? Check out this stackoverflow answer: Simple way to convert HH:MM:SS (hours:minutes:seconds.split seconds) to seconds

edited May 23 '17 at 12:18

Community

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1

answered Feb 22 '13 at 07:34

Max

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@Steve That would be impossible because Max has 1 rep. – ZZ-bb Feb 22 '13 at 07:54

Is there a unix program to convert various HH:MM:SS formats to seconds?

2 Answers2