Printing epoch time with the date utility

shell command-line quoting date

33,403

BSD date and GNU date both have the form:

date +FORMAT

with FORMAT is the output format string for display the date. So what you would feed to date is just a string, starting with +.

Before you passing the string to date, the string is interpreted by your shell. So +%s or +'%s' or "+%s" are both equivalent, interpreted as-is by all POSIX shells.

The only advantage of +'%s' is that you can quickly detect which string format was used, or copying, parsing it without worrying about the +.

Also, +'FORMAT' will helps you when you use some special formats, which can be interpreted as your shell expansion. Example with zsh:

date +'(%s)'

would work while:

date +(%s)

would not.

33,403

mbigras

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

mbigras almost 2 years
From reading another answer I know the following command can be used to print the current epoch time:
```
$ date +'%s'
1491150773
```
From reading through the date(1) man page (note: I actually use macOS) I found an example illustrating the usage:
```
 Finally the command:

 date -j -f "%a %b %d %T %Z %Y" "`date`" "+%s"

 can be used to parse the output from date and express it in Epoch time.
```
From reading the example, it seems like the + can go inside the single quotes:
```
$ date '+%s'
1491150781
```
Even though I'm able to successfully print the current epoch time I don't understand why it's working and have some questions:
- Why does date +'%s' print the current epoch time? Is there a more general example that illustrates the pattern behind it's usage in this example?
- Why am I able to put the + inside the quotes?
I've tried putting the command into explainshell, but it isn't very helpful:
- roaima about 7 years
  
  Are you using FreeBSD, as the link to the man page implies?
- mbigras about 7 years
  
  Yes, I'm on macOS which uses bsd utilities
- roaima about 7 years
  
  OK. I've added that as a tag to people can identify this more easily. Otherwise you're likely to get some very Linux and GNU-centric responses. You might even want to mention it in passing within your question.
- Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' about 7 years
  
  @roaima Please don't put an OS tag on a question that isn't OS-specific. Since the question is largely OS-agnostic, a mention of the OS in the body is fine, and no OS tag should be used.
- roaima about 7 years
  
  @Gilles in this particular case it's not OS agnostic; the BSD and GNU date commands are somewhat different.
- terdon about 7 years
  
  @roaima yes, but they don't differ in this, so the tag is not needed. The OS should be in the body of the question, yes, but OS tags shouldn't be used just to indicate what system the OP is using.
Admin about 2 years

Note that %s is not POSIX compatible. pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/date.html