hi,

i have heard that date and time stamp are stored somewhere in unix as an interger.

suppose May 20 07:05:59 is stored as 12342234

can anyone tell me where to find this integer.

The integer is the number of seconds since January 1st, 1970. It's also called the Unix epoch. You can print it e.g. with the command date +%s

thanks i got that.
Actuall my requirement is i have say file1 whose time is May 20 06:20.

How to covert this time into seconds.and after that converting the current time into seconds and subtracting both to get the delay time of file 1.

just consider this scenario:

file 1 -----May 20 06:20-------234567sec
current system time-May 21 01:49:35------------3455666sec

and then subtracting this two values,to get delay time of file 1.

Use the %s format suggested by Era.

date --utc --date "May 20 06:00" +%s

its showing the following error

date: illegal option -- -
Usage: date [-u] [+Field Descriptors]

There are different versions of the date command. If you are on Sun or HP-UX, see if you can find an XPG4 version. Or you could see if you have the stat command available.

i have found the command and its working fine in linux, but not in IBM AIX 5.3

date '+%s' -r filename.

this command gives time in seconds of given filename.

i want to know the command in IBM AIX