YJL

Few days ago (2014-06-21T10:19:46Z), I was very surprised to discover the --pretty format of uptime, when I ran it with -h, which I never did before:

-p, --pretty   show uptime in pretty format
-s, --since    system up since

Neither had I read uptime(1), it was first times to do both. I was wondering how my dzen status calculated the uptime, which should be from /proc/uptime not uptime command. Anyway, I started to find out when the pretty format was added.

The feature #3e7f78d was added after 2012-02-22 via a pull request¹. Here are some outputs of uptime:

$ uptime -p
up 1 week, 5 hours, 21 minutes

$ uptime -s
2014-06-20 10:51:41

$ date -d "$(uptime -s)" +%s
1403232701

$ echo \
  $((($(date +%s) - $(date -d "$(uptime -s)" +%s)) / 3600)) \
  hours
173 hours

$ td.sh $((($(date +%s) - $(date -d "$(uptime -s)" +%s))))
7 days 5 hours 22 minutes 36 seconds

The last one uses td.sh, which is actually the main reason why I wondered how my dzen status does the calculation, it uses td.sh to convert seconds into human-readable time duration. At this moment, I am currently in the process to transform it into a C and GNU Autotools learning project, although I haven’t yet made any progress. Too many things to do, and too little time.

Since we are talking about human-readable and pretty print, you might also want to know we have dmesg --human.