How to display Unix time in the timestamp format?

Question

I'm looking for a way to display my time in Debian Linux as a timestamp, e.g.

1279628325

I can't find any options to do that with the date command. Any ideas?

Answer 1

You can do this with

date +%s

For more possibilities, see

man date

Answer 2

My favorite way:

perl -e 'print time'

Answer 3

srand without a value uses the current timestamp with these Awk implementations:

• gawk
• gawk --posix
• mawk 1.3.3
• nawk

so you can use Awk:

awk 'BEGIN {srand(); print srand()}'

Or the awk Velour library:

velour -n 'print t_now()'