Does anyone know of an easy way to convert regular time 08/21/2002 @ 8:21:21 pm to ctime. I need this to complete a script that I am writing.

Your expertise and help would be amost appreciated. Please note - I am not a programmer so c-code etc will not help. A utility that can be run from a commnd line or an easy script for unix would help a great deal.

Thanks.

Try looking at the man page for your implementation of the date command.
On a Linux system, you can get (for example) the number of seconds from the epoch like this:

date +%s

date --date="1 day ago" +%Y%m%d

boy, if you are using unix or linux,
all you have to do is

man date

and you'll get to know everything you want

I am actually trying to get a script to move our backup tapes from one system to another and the assigned date / time is in the format ... 02/01/2002 10:13:17 AM. To import the tapes there is a parameter for the assigned time but it needs ctime which, in this case is ... 1012587197.

I know of DTConverter but it does not have any command line switches to automatically perform the task within a script.

If I give the initial format a variable named for e.g. ASSIGNED, how can I use that to get another variable name for e.g. CASSIGNED which will have the inital $ASSIGNED converted to ctime?

Hopefully this makes sense.

Thanks kindly for any help that you can give.

BTW - I am running the sctipt on an NT 2000 server using the UNIX Korn Shell utilities.

NIce way to make NT useful, install UNIX commands on it...

If you can find a port of GNU "date" for Win*, I would personally install that. It should be as easy as that, and it will work it's way into a script very nicely:

...
ASSIGNED="02/01/2002 10:13:17 AM"
CASSIGNED=$(date --date="$ASSIGNED" +%s)

print $CASSIGNED
...

As much as I would like to say that I understand exactly what you are saying - I must admit that I am still at a loss.

Although I understand the code and what it is doing - What is "a port of GNU date for WIN"?

I have the UNIX MKS toolkit installed and it has the UNIX date function but the man page does not list the %s variable and the code you gave does not work so I assume that the "port of GNU date for WIN" is what is missing?

Can you possibly enlighten me further as this would be saving me a lot of work?

Thank you for all your help - It is much appreciated.

Sorry 'bout that...

The GNU project (http://www.gnu.org) has a version of the "date" program that ties some incredible functionality into the "standard" date...

A quick Google search for "GNU date.exe" found this page, among others:
http://www.weihenstephan.de/~syring/win32/UnxUtils.html

I've never used them, so I don't know how well they work, or if they're even the right version I'm looking for...

You might not be able to find GNU date for the Windows platform...