Unix Timestamp

Mon Oct 22 21:08:11 UTC 2001

[ On Monday, October 22, 2001 at 15:37:46 (-0400), Barry Shein wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Unix Timestamp
>
> % perl5 -e '$x = localtime(1003723200); print "$x\n"

PERL!?!?!?  What the heck's the matter with "date"!?!?!?!?  0.0 :-)

$ date -r 1003723200
Mon Oct 22 00:00:00 EDT 2001

Just to clarify what I mean by my surprise above:

$ time ksh -c 'i=0; while [ $i -lt 100 ] ; do date -r 1003723200 ; : $((i++)) ; done > /dev/null'
   5.24s real    0.65s user    4.43s system 

$ time ksh -c 'i=0; while [ $i -lt 100 ] ; do perl -e '\''$x = localtime(1003723200); print "$x\n"'\'' ; : $((i++)) ; done > /dev/null'
  26.72s real    7.48s user   12.64s system 

(no it's not a fast system, just an old SS2, but it's a great demo of
the abuses some people will do with perl)

Heck even GNU Awk, one of the usually slower and more gargantuan awks
(but the only one with strftime()), does as well or better than 'date':

$ time ksh -c 'i=0; while [ $i -lt 10 ] ; do gawk '\''END{print strftime("%c",1003723200)}'\'' < /dev/null ; : $((i++)) ; done > /dev/null'
   1.91s real    0.62s user    1.15s system

(oddly gawk does consistently better than date in the system and real
time, though almost always about the same in the user time -- and one of
the reasons this is odd is 'date' is static linked and about 1/2 the
size of the dynamic-linked gawk!)

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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