Duration Calculation

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I have 2 variables

startTime='122717 23:20'	
endTime='122817 0:40'

how can i get the elapsed duration as like "1 hour 20 minutes" ?

2

What OS and shell do you work on?

3

OS = AIX oslevel:7.1
SHELL = KSH

4

Which version(s) of ksh do you have on AIX 7.1?

What output do you get from:

ksh --version
ksh93 --version
5 
ksh93 --version
  version         sh (AT&T Research) 93t+ 2009-05-01
6

I'm not sure if 93t+ is recent enough to support this... What output do you get from the command:

printf '%(%Y-%m-%d@%H:%M:%S %s\n)T' '12/28/17 0:40' '12/27/17 23:20'

In the US Pacific timezone, it should give you:

2017-12-28@00:40:00 1514450400
2017-12-27@23:20:00 1514445600

In other timezones, the last number on each line will be different (but the difference between those numbers will be a constant... the number of seconds between those two times).

If you do get output similar to the above, does that give you enough information to solve your problem?

7

This is what i get

# printf '%(%Y-%m-%d@%H:%M:%S %s\n)T' '12/28/17 0:40' '12/27/17 23:20'
(Y-%d@%M:%s
)T
#
8

You can always use the POSIX definition of Seconds Since the Epoch:

to calculate the number of seconds since the Epoch for both of your dates, subtract the start time from the end time and convert the resulting seconds into a number of days, hours, and minutes.

If you search these forums, you can also find methods of doing this using perl .

9

I think you executed that in the standard ksh , not in ksh93 .
Could you switch to ksh93 and try again?

$ ksh93
$ printf '%(%Y-%m-%d@%H:%M:%S %s\n)T' '12/28/17 0:40' '12/27/17 23:20'
2017-12-28@00:40:00 1514418000
2017-12-27@23:20:00 1514413200
$