Calculate Days Since 1/1/1970

How can you calculate the number of days since 1/1/1970? This is for updating the shadowLastChange attribute on OpenLDAP.

Is there a way to do this using the linux date command?

ring0 beat me by a few seconds, but the full command is:

echo $(($(date --utc --date "$1" +%s)/86400))

This goes by UTC time. Result:

root@hostname:~# echo $((`date --utc --date "$1" +%s`/86400))
14984

A quick check with WolframAlpha shows that this is the correct value.

I think this is the simplest method:

expr $(date +%s) / 86400

The date command can give you the number of seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC.

  date +"%s"

You can divide the result by 3600*24 to get the number of days (UTC).

E.g. in Bash

  x=`date +"%s"` ; echo $(( $x / 3600 / 24 ))

to display the number of days.

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