Convert a human readable date to epoch with a shell script on OpenBSD and Mac OS X -

Dates can be quite challenging. Especially if you systematically want to use dates, for example to compare what date is older.

If you would like to convert this date into epoch, take these steps.

$ # The first step is to print the date.
$ echo "2009/05/25 18:34:30;"
2009/05/25 18:34:30;
$ # This step is to strip the /-es.
$ echo "2009/05/25 18:34:30;" | sed 's%/%%g'
20090525 18:34:30;
$ # This step removes the space
$ echo "2009/05/25 18:34:30;" |  sed 's%/%%g;s% %%g'
2009052518:34:30;
$ # This step removes the trailing :30;.
$ echo "2009/05/25 18:34:30;" | sed 's%/%%g;s% %%g;s%:..;%%'
2009052518:34
$ # This step removes the :.
$ echo "2009/05/25 18:34:30;" | sed 's%/%%g;s% %%g;s%:..;%%;s%:%%g'
200905251834
$ # Finally feed that output to the "date" command.
$ date -j "+%s" $(echo "2009/05/25 18:34:30;" | sed 's%/%%g;s% %%g;s%:..;%%;s%:%%g')
1243269240

On Mac OS X you'd have to use this command:

$ date -j -f date -j -f "%Y/%m/%d %T" "2009/10/15 04:58:06" +"%s"
1255575486