Shell Programming and Scripting

For some dumb reason, I'm having the strangest hard time getting awk to convert epoch time to UTC human time. I'm using CentOS 5.5 and gawk 3.1.5. There are 2 approaches that I know. First, the strftime call:

Code:

Tandy400 $ echo 1308607169 | awk '{print strftime("%c",$1)}'
Mon 20 Jun 2011 03:59:29 PM MDT

That mostly works, but it's in MDT. I need UTC. So, I read the following:

Nifty, right? Ok, so I do, and get back, this:

Code:

Tandy400 $ echo 1308607169 | awk '{print strftime("%c",$1,0)}'
awk: fatal: 3 is invalid as number of arguments for strftime

So, apparently the C function that awk is calling can't support that third option. On to using the shell "date" command. I can do this:

Code:

Tandy400 $ date -ud @1308607169
Mon Jun 20 21:59:29 UTC 2011

That's what I want; however, getting awk to work with that is not working. So, how might I get this to work? I need awk to somehow run that command on a field and save its output to a variable that awk can work with later. Something like...

Code:

echo 1308607169 | awk '{htime=("date -ud @"$1 | getline) ; print "Epoch time converts to " htime}'

...except that I'd prefer that it work. system() seems right out-- I need the actual response, not the status code. Any thoughts?

Performance is not a big deal... this conversion will work with a handful of dates each day. For my own education, though, I'd love to understand how to get both working, as it seems like there really should be a way.

Many thanks in advance.

For the scope of the awk command, unset TZ and it will return zulu (GMT).

Code:

echo 1308784748 | TZ= awk '{print strftime("%c",$1)}'
Wed Jun 22 23:19:08 2011

echo 1308784748 | awk '{print strftime("%c",$1)}'    
Wed Jun 22 19:19:08 2011

And this should give you the ability to use the date command if you'd rather:

Code:

awk 'BEGIN { c="date -ud @1308607169"; c|getline; close( c ); print $0; }';  
Mon Jun 20 21:59:29 UTC 2011

I usually write a cmd() function that accepts the command, executes, closes the pipe, and returns the output. Very useful for single line output, a bit more tricky to snarf multiple output, but not difficult.

Ooh, that's cool. I've never seen the bit with unsetting (and, presumably, setting) a system variable only for the scope of a command. Many thanks for great reply.

Yes, you could have set it to generate a time for any timezone using something like this:

Code:

TZ=/usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Denver date

You can also set multiple environment variables too:

Code:

FOO=Hello BAR=world  some_command