schoenenberg/unixtime

A small utility for working with UNIX time.

unixtime

A small utility for working with UNIX time.

Motivation

Sometimes I need the current unix-time for interacting with APIs and other stuff. But I never remember the correct command for it (it's date +%s). I mostly end up googling the current unix-time. Late at night, I quickly built the original version of this tool. Maybe someone is having the same issue.

Features

• Printing the current UNIX timestamp in seconds, milliseconds or nanoseconds
• Reverse conversion of UNIX timestamp to human readable format (RFC 2822, RFC 3339)

As it's using chrono as date and time library this should also work on Windows and other systems not having the date command.

Installation

Download a prebuilt binary

macOS

Install unixtime with the homebrew package manager:

brew tap schoenenberg/tap
brew install unixtime

cargo package manager

unixtime can be installed using the Rust package manager cargo:

cargo install unixtime

Then you should be able to launch unixtime.

Benchmark

Benchmarks were executed with the hyperfine utility:

$> hyperfine 'date +%s' 'unixtime' --warmup 50
Benchmark #1: date +%s
  Time (mean ± σ):       1.5 ms ±   0.6 ms    [User: 0.5 ms, System: 0.6 ms]
  Range (min … max):     0.9 ms …   5.5 ms    626 runs
 
  Warning: Command took less than 5 ms to complete. Results might be inaccurate.
  Warning: Statistical outliers were detected. Consider re-running this benchmark on a quiet PC without any interferences from other programs. It might help to use the '--warmup' or '--prepare' options.
 
Benchmark #2: unixtime
  Time (mean ± σ):       2.7 ms ±   0.7 ms    [User: 0.9 ms, System: 0.6 ms]
  Range (min … max):     2.0 ms …   6.4 ms    476 runs
 
  Warning: Command took less than 5 ms to complete. Results might be inaccurate.
  Warning: Statistical outliers were detected. Consider re-running this benchmark on a quiet PC without any interferences from other programs. It might help to use the '--warmup' or '--prepare' options.
 
Summary
  'date +%s' ran
    1.79 ± 0.85 times faster than 'unixtime'

unixtime's Issues

Reverse unixtime

Hey, here a small feature request.

I recently wanted to get unixtime's into a usual date format (like RFC 3339).

In date I do:

$ date --date=@1458647617
Tue Mar 22 11:53:37 AM UTC 2016

But I often forget it, and I think it's a nice addition to your unixtime binary.