Shell Programming and Scripting

The purpose of the below is to grab the 9th field of the data in "$epochtimeframe". and then translate that data (which is an epoch time), into a human readable form.

Code:

echo $epochtimeframe | awk -F"--" '{print $9}' | awk -F"," '{print $2}' | perl -pe 's/(\d+)/localtime($1)/e'

i'm sure many will agree the above is not efficient. i'm calling awk too many times and i doubt "perl" is necessary here.

any ideas on how to shorten this command or make awk do everything?

Pardon my ignorance... Can you show us what value you have in your variable: epochtimeframe?

In case not everyone knows what an "epoch time" is, or what kind of "human readable" you want, could you please post an example of a few inputs you want to transform, and what you want the output to look like? Thanks.

Come on SkySmart; after making more than 450 posts in these forums surely you know by now that we need to know what $epochtimeframe expands to for us to be able to provide any decent help here. Can we please have some samples showing inputs and and the corresponding outputs you want to be produced?

And, what shell and operating system are you using?

Sorry guys. content of epochtimeframe is:

Code:

cpl--lim--fl--pass--own--ast--rehi--asto--1364821336,1364821697--jui--welp--legitimate

Code:

awk -v E="$epochtimeframe" 'BEGIN{gsub(/.*,|--.*/,x,E); print strftime("%c",E)}'

will this always work even if the field in which the epoch time is, changes? in the sample i provided, it was in the 9th field/column. other times, it may be in another field.