Unix Time in MySQL and bash

Posted on February 4, 2009

A quick one today. I was working on a mysql database that used unix timestamp produced by PHP’s time() function.

I needed to be able to quickly convert this time to a human-readable format. In bash,

date -d @timestamp

is a quick way to convert.

In a terminal shell eg:

# date -d @1224992980
Sun Oct 26 14:49:40 EST 2008

In a MySQL client, you could also use

select date(from_unixtime(column_name)) from table_name;

Or if you want a little more flexibility in the output, for example outputting 27/02/09, you could do:

select date_format(from_unixtime(column_name), ‘%d/%m/%y’) from table_name;

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