How it works...

The Unix epoch is defined as the number of seconds that have elapsed since midnight proleptic Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) of January 1, 1970, not counting leap seconds. Epoch time is useful when you need to calculate the difference between two dates or times. Convert the two date strings to epoch and take the difference between the epoch values. This recipe calculates the number of seconds between two dates:

secs1=`date -d "Jan 2 1970" 
secs2=`date -d "Jan 3 1970" 
echo "There are `expr $secs2 - $secs1` seconds between Jan 2 and Jan 3" 
There are 86400 seconds between Jan 2 and Jan 3 

Displaying a time in seconds since midnight of January 1, 1970, is not easily read by humans. The date command supports output in human readable formats.

The following table lists the format options that the date command supports.