David Nash

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;

This post is one of my most popular posts. Did you find the information you were after? Please tell me in the comments!

I generally only need to do this once for each project, which means I don’t do it often enough to remember. Log in to the MySQL server as root, then:

create database newdb;
grant all on newdb.* to 'newuser'@'localhost' identified by 'newuser';
set password for 'newuser'@'localhost' = password('newpass');

And you’re ready to go!
Replace newdb, newuser and newpass with whatever you like.