Is strftime with nanoseconds possible in bash?

Question

Is there any way to obtain Unix Time with nanoseconds with strftime in bash?

My line for unix time :

<command> |  awk '{ print strftime("%s"),  $0; }'

I cannot use date +%N because date is only evaluated once.

Is there any work around?

Answer 1

You could still use date

ls | xargs -IQ date "+%s.%N Q"

Just do not have % in your output... (but you can work around that too)

Answer 2

I found a workaround using while read. date gets updated that way. No need for strftime.

<command> |  while read line; do d=`date +%s%N`; echo $d $line; done