bashdate

Bash: Display Nano Seconds With Date


With date it is possible to generate formatted time strings like

date +"%Y-%m-%d-%H:%M:%S.%N"

With date it is also possible to create unix timestamps in nano seconds. Using

NANO_TIMESTAMP=$(date +%s%N)

Is it possible to use date to read in a nano second timestamp to create a formatted date string?

How can I pass a nano second timestamp to date?

I tried:

date -d$NANO_TIMESTAMP +%H:%M:%S.%N     
date: invalid date ‘1550736813798767689’

date -d@$NANO_TIMESTAMP +"%Y-%m-%d-%H:%M:%S.%N"
date: time 1550736813798767689 is out of range

Solution

  • Like this but without math.

    NANO_TIMESTAMP=$(date +%s%N)
    secs=$(printf "%1d\n" ${NANO_TIMESTAMP: 0 : -9})
    nanos=${NANO_TIMESTAMP: -9 : 9 }
    printf '\r%s' $(TZ=UTC date -d@$secs.$nanos +"%Y-%m-%d-%H:%M:%S.%N")
    

    With printf "%1d" I want to make sure, that there is at least one zero in the secs variable.