Date string conversion within a file

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,

I have a log file that contains information along the lines of the following:

=========
jobnumber    322761
start_time   Tue May 19 19:42:37 2009
end_time     Tue May 19 20:11:28 2009
failed       0
=========
jobnumber    322762
start_time   Tue May 19 19:39:51 2009
end_time     Tue May 19 20:28:44 2009
failed       0
=========
jobnumber    322763
etc

The file(s) may contain tens of thousands of records. I want to convert the date string to unix time (secs since 1970 blah), i.e. date -d "Tue May 19 20:28:44 2009" +%s

So the output I want is:

=========
jobnumber    322761
start_time   1242758557
end_time     1242760288
failed       0
=========
jobnumber    322762
start_time   1242758391
end_time     1242761324
failed       0
=========
jobnumber    322763
etc

Any ideas?

Many thanks!

2

One way would be to use GNU awk together with something like the Mktime Function to convert the date strings.

3

if you have GNU date, you can convert the date to epoch time by below command:

$ date -d "Tue May 19 19:42:37 2009" +%s
1242726157
4 
$ 
$ 
$ cat f9
=========
jobnumber    322761
start_time   Tue May 19 19:42:37 2009
end_time     Tue May 19 20:11:28 2009
failed       0
=========
jobnumber    322762
start_time   Tue May 19 19:39:51 2009
end_time     Tue May 19 20:28:44 2009
failed       0
=========
$ 
$ # Using a Perl one-liner
$ ##
$ perl -M"Date::Calc qw(:all)" -lne '
> if (/^(start_time|end_time)\s*(\w+ \w+ \d+) (\d+:\d+:\d+) (\d+)$/){
>   printf("%-10s   %s\n",$1,Mktime(Parse_Date("$2 $4"),split(/:/,$3)))
> } else {print}' f9
=========
jobnumber    322761
start_time   1242776557
end_time     1242778288
failed       0
=========
jobnumber    322762
start_time   1242776391
end_time     1242779324
failed       0
=========
$ 
$ 
$ # Using the Bash shell
$ while read val1 val2
> do
>   if [ "$val1" == "start_time" -o "$val1" == "end_time" ]; then
>     printf "%-10s   %s\n" $val1 `date -d "$val2" +%s`
>   else  
>     printf "%-10s   %s\n" $val1 "$val2"
>   fi
> done <f9
=========    
jobnumber    322761
start_time   1242776557
end_time     1242778288
failed       0
=========    
jobnumber    322762
start_time   1242776391
end_time     1242779324
failed       0
=========    
$ 
$

tyler_durden

5

Thanks for the responses and apologies for the formatting of the initial post. I went with Tyler's bash solution (I understand what is going on here, as opposed to the perl one). File was a bit longer than I expected, at just shy of 10 million records, and took nearly 24 hours to run, but the output is exactly what I wanted.

Thanks very much!