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.

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'

Installation

Installation requires the Rust-Toolchain. Then install it by executing:

cargo install unixtime

Then you should be able to launch unixtime.