With GNU date (from the GNU coreutils package), specify the date to parse with -d
and seconds since epoch with %s
$ date -d"2014-02-14T12:30" +%s
1392381000
Note that this will interpret the date to be parsed as being in your local time zone. If you want date
to use a specific time zone, you must specify that, either via the variable TZ (which changes the default time zone for date
), or in the date string. For UTC:
$ TZ=UTC date -d"2014-02-14T12:30" +%s
1392381000
or in the string, according to ISO 8601:
$ date -d"2014-02-14T12:30Z" +%s
1392381000
See ISO 8601 on Wikipedia for how to specify other time zones in the date string.