For one thing, you'll find GNU date in Linux as well as OSX. For another thing, I'm guessing that date is a less heavyweight utility than systemsetup.

To get epoch seconds from GNU date, you just do date +%s

To set the date with epoch seconds, I think you do date -s @192342... where 192342... is your epoch seconds of course and @ tells date that it's epoch seconds. Just one of the little things you have to dig real deep into date's info files to find.

---------- Post updated at 01:08 PM ---------- Previous update was at 01:05 PM ----------

You can set IFS for individual lines and nothing else by prefixing the line. Like: IFS=":" read HH MM SS < datafile Though IFS of course can have side-effects on how parameters expand so be careful what you put on the right-hand side.

You can also use IFS to seperate things into arrays for you.

Code:

OLDIFS="${IFS}"
IFS=":"
ARRAY=( ${SOMETHING_WITH_COLONS_IN_IT} )
IFS="${OLDIFS}"