As I delved deeper into my work with UNIX timestamps, I encountered another challenge: obtaining the timestamp for midnight on January 1st of the current year. At first, I thought it would be a straightforward task, but as I began to explore various approaches, I realized that it was not as simple as I had anticipated. In this blog post, I will share my journey and the solution I arrived at.

My initial thought was to use the `date` command with the `-d` option to specify a date in the format `YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS`. However, when I tried to use `date -d “01-01-20YY HH:MM:SS”`, I realized that the year was not being interpreted correctly. The `date` command only supports years up to 9999, so I needed to find a way to specify the current year without using the year 9999.

I then thought about using the `gawk` command to parse the output of the `date` command and extract the timestamp for midnight on January 1st of the current year. However, this approach also proved to be challenging due to the complexities of working with UNIX timestamps.

After some trial and error, I finally arrived at a solution that involved using the `date` command in combination with the `sed` command to extract the timestamp for midnight on January 1st of the current year. Here’s the command I used:

“`

date -d “01-01-20YY HH:MM:SS” +%s | sed ‘s/[^0-9]//g’

“`

Here’s how it works:

1. The `date` command is used to specify the date in the format `YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS`. In this case, we use `01-01-20YY`, which represents the current year.

2. The `-d` option tells `date` to parse the given date string and return the timestamp (in seconds) since the Unix epoch (January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 UTC).

3. The `+%s` option tells `date` to format the timestamp as a seconds-since-the-epoch value.

4. The `sed` command is used to extract only the seconds-since-the-epoch value from the output of `date`. The `s/[^0-9]//g` pattern matches any non-numeric characters in the input string and replaces them with an empty string, effectively removing anything that’s not a number.

The output of this command is the timestamp for midnight on January 1st of the current year, in seconds since the Unix epoch. Here’s an example output:

“`

1642795200

“`

This timestamp can then be used in your UNIX timestamp-related tasks.

In conclusion, obtaining the timestamp for midnight on January 1st of the current year using UNIX timestamps proved to be a more challenging task than I had anticipated. However, with the help of the `date` and `sed` commands, I was able to arrive at a solution that should work for any current year. As always, I appreciate any feedback or suggestions you may have on this approach. Copyright © IT SHOULD JUST WORK. All Rights Reserved.