Perl date FAQ: Can you share a Perl date example where you print a date in a decent human-readable format?
Update: Be sure to look at the comments below for some great Perl "one liners", i.e., one-line solutions to this problem.
In this blog I'll share the source code for a Perl program that takes nagios.logrecords as input, then outputs the records with a human-readable date format. More specifically, the input records look like this:
[1225306053] SERVICE ALERT: FTPSERVER;FTP SERVICE;OK;SOFT;2;FTP OK - 0.029 second response time on port 21 [220 ProFTPD 1.3.1 Server ready.] [1225307073] SERVICE ALERT: FTPSERVER;FTP SERVICE;OK;SOFT;3;FTP OK - 0.046 second response time on port 21 [220 ProFTPD 1.3.1 Server ready.]
and the output records look like this:
[2008/10/29 14:47:33] SERVICE ALERT: FTPSERVER;FTP SERVICE;OK;SOFT;2;FTP OK - 0.029 second response time on port 21 [220 ProFTPD 1.3.1 Server ready.] [2008/10/29 15:04:33] SERVICE ALERT: FTPSERVER;FTP SERVICE;OK;SOFT;3;FTP OK - 0.046 second response time on port 21 [220 ProFTPD 1.3.1 Server ready.]
Perl date format - My Perl Nagios script
UPDATE: For some terrific one-line solutions to this problem, see the Comments section below.
Here's the source code for my Perl script that converts these date fields into a human-readable format:
#!/usr/bin/perl
# ------------------------------------------------------------
# fixnag.pl
# ------------------------------------------------------------
# a script to take nagios.log records as input, and then
# output them with the date field converted to something
# human-readable
# ------------------------------------------------------------
sub epochtime
{
my $epoch_time = shift;
($sec,$min,$hour,$day,$month,$year) = localtime($epoch_time);
# correct the date and month for humans
$year = 1900 + $year;
$month++;
return sprintf("%02d/%02d/%02d %02d:%02d:%02d", $year, $month, $day, $hour, $min, $sec);
}
while (<>)
{
my $epoch = substr $_, 1, 10;
my $remainder = substr $_, 13;
my $human_date = &epochtime($epoch);
printf("[%s] %s", $human_date, $remainder);
}
exit;
All you have to do to run this script from the command line is something like this:
$ cat nagios.log | fixnag.pl

