Calculate Days Since 1/1/1970

Question

How can you calculate the number of days since 1/1/1970? This is for updating the shadowLastChange attribute on OpenLDAP.

Is there a way to do this using the linux date command?

In Bash and most modern Bourne-derived shells, $() is preferred over backticks for readability and other reasons. echo $(( $(date ...) / 86400 ))
Don't have 2000 yet... can someone edit and fix the title :-)

Dave Drager · Accepted Answer · 2011-01-10 20:42:35Z

up vote 10 down vote accepted

ring0 beat me by a few seconds, but the full command is:

echo $(($(date --utc --date "$1" +%s)/86400))

This goes by UTC time. Result:

root@hostname:~# echo $((`date --utc --date "$1" +%s`/86400))
14984

A quick check with WolframAlpha shows that this is the correct value.

edited Jan 10 '11 at 20:42

answered Jan 10 '11 at 13:42

Dave Drager
6,3151032

thanks for the fairness ;-) – ring0 Jan 14 '11 at 18:29

ring0 · Answer 2 · 2011-01-10 13:45:54Z

up vote 7 down vote

The date command can give you the number of seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC.

  date +"%s"

You can divide the result by 3600*24 to get the number of days (UTC).

E.g. in Bash

  x=`date +"%s"` ; echo $(( $x / 3600 / 24 ))

to display the number of days.

edited Jan 10 '11 at 13:45

answered Jan 10 '11 at 13:40

ring0
2,3361622

2 Answers