Computing

I looked all over trying to find an easy way to convert a date to a UNIX timestamp in a shell or perl script. I was disappointed that I didn't find anything that was easy, sure and didn't require extra software. Most of my UNIX scripts have to operate on Mac OS X so I don't concern myself too much about portability and generally try to use what's already available on the system.

The easiest way I found to convert a date string to a UNIX timestamp is with PHP's strtotime function. Fortunately, PHP is included on Mac OS X machine at no extra charge! This one-liner handles the need pretty well.



The constants: STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR are predefined to make life easy!

For more info, check out: "Using PHP from the command line."

After making some path changes this blog here, I needed to update some of the URLs in previous entries (mainly image URLs). I thought it was going to be tough but it turns out there's an easy way to do it with a SQL one-liner.



I love simple solutions!