How to convert time format from "2010-10-08 00:00:01" to "1286467201" in awk

Question

In awk, Is there a way to convert the time format from "2010-10-08 00:00:01" to 1286467201
as using the command "date"
$ date +%s -d '2010-10-08 00:00:01'
1286467201

Answer 1

GNU awk has a mktime function that can do the job. However, it's crucial to be aware of timezones. The string "2010-10-08 00:00:01" does not contain enough information to define a specific time. If you assume it is in UTC you can do:

$ echo 2010-10-08 00:00:01 | \
  TZ=UTC gawk '{ tstr=$1" "$2; gsub(/[\-:]/, " ", tstr); print mktime(tstr); }'
1286496001

If you don't specify the TZ variable you end up with the server's time zone (which should be UTC anyway, but a lot of folks use local time on servers, so it's not a safe assumption).

You can get UTC output from your date command by altering it slightly:

$ date +%s -u -d '2010-10-08 00:00:01'