How to convert ZSH ls timestamps to %Y-%m-%d?

Question

Anyone know how to convert zsh ls timestamps to %Y-%m-%d?

From this (zsh):

host1% ls -lrt | tail -1

-rw-r----- 1 user group 4802 Mar 21 15:41 get.csv

To this (bash):

user@host1:/home/user> ls -ltr | tail -1

-rw-r----- 1 user group 4802 2013-03-21 15:41 get.csv

Answer 1

This can work:

$ date -d "Mar 21 15:41" "+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M"
2013-03-21 15:41

Where with -d you give the script the date you want to parse and each variable within "+ ..." stands for:

• Y year
• m month
• d day
• H hour (24h)
• M minute

To get Mar 21 15:41 from the initial line (the one coming from ls -l), you can

$ echo "-rw-r----- 1 user group 4802 Mar 21 15:41 get.csv" | cut -d' ' -f6,7,8
Mar 21 15:41

---

As indicated in comments by the OP, the -r (display the last modification time of FILE) parameter can be useful for this purpose, as it indicates the file from which we want to know the info:

$ date -r name_of_file "+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M"

Answer 2

Assuming you are using GNU ls, you can specify the time-stamp format as an option to ls. Once you figure the format you want you just make an alias to always use that option. Really just check that link and try using the options.