I want to mimic the format used in log4j for timestamps using the linux date (just some quick scripting)
On log4j the format is defined as
%d{dd MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss,SSS}
That would translate into lines like:
2016-03-10 07:01:09,778
2016-03-10 07:01:09,784
Can this be accomplished in date? The closer I got was using
date +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S,%N"
But this still has 9 digits instead of 3, any ideas? I’d prefer not using sed/cut,etc, but if there’s no alternative it’d be fine.
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Answer
That %N is giving you the number of nanoseconds, (one billion per second) hence the nine digits, and GNU date doesn’t have a milliseconds option.
Thankfully we can specify the field width like this
date +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S,%3N"
To turn billionths into thousandths.
M.