How to convert a date in yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss to unix epoch time

Question

I have date format like 2016-02-26 14:12:36., I have to convert it into unix epoch time. I have the option to convert current time to epoch time using command : date +%s, however how to convert a specific date to epoch unix time

Answer 1

On the command line you convert the date provided to the UNIX epoch time like this:

date -j -f "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S" "2016-02-26 14:12:36" "+%s"

This is on os x. The manual for date have some examples and strftime have all the formatting needed.

Answer 2

You can get seconds since the epoch from date like this ,

$ SECFROMEPOCH=`date --date="2016-02-26 14:12:36" +%s`

And then you can check the value that date gave back to you like this,

$ echo $SECFROMEPOCH | awk '{print strftime("%c",$1)}'