I already wrote about epoch-seconds, but there is a quicker way to get them, this time without resorting to Perl.
$ date "+%s"
Will return the current epoch-seconds, at the time of this writing 1191687083. This should work with most incarnations of the date-command. For the restless (a.k.a. the ones not willing to read the post linked to above), converting from epoch-seconds to human-readable time works like this:
$ date -r 1191687083
Or whatever second-count you want to convert, of course. One last thing to try:
$ date -r 0000000000
Returns the time your system deems to be the beginning of its time, usually January 1st 1970.
I have no idea, if some of this works on Windows™, it should though, if you’d install cygwin on it.
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