Bash’s builtin command printf is always a fascinating one to me and it amazed me when found out it supports time format for Unix time. A quick test shows the performance comparing to using external command date:

time for ((i=0; i<1000; i++)); do date -d @0 +%c >/dev/null; done
time for ((i=0; i<1000; i++)); do printf "%(%c)T\n" 0 >/dev/null; done

real  0m2.108s
user  0m0.215s
sys   0m1.117s

real  0m0.045s
user  0m0.032s
sys   0m0.012s

More than 50 times faster if the code is to print out a formatted time with Unix time.

If you need the current time, you still don’t need to use date, printf can do that very much, with -1 as the time:

printf '%(%c)T\n' -1

printf -v now '%(%s)T' -1
echo $now
# equals to
now=$(date +%s)
echo $now

Fri 10 May 2013 02:03:59 PM CST
1368165839
1368165839

-v option is another great thing about printf.