A good utility to calculate date/time differences

[Gavin-Holt]

Hi,

I was very excited to discover CSVtk and delighted that I could create data pipelines.

However, my use-case requires me to calculate date/time intervals to see how long patients wait for surgery (hours for emergencies, days for elective surgery). I would like to append new fields with the calculations.

Does anyone know of a good utility that allows me to calculate date/time differences (on a Windows machine) in a pipeline?

Good equates to:

• Free, with compiled executables for Windows.
• Read and write to stdin/stdout.
• Works at the command line and in a batch file, without having to "escape" multiple characters, as this is the nightmare of trying to use awk at the command line in windows.

I guess I might need several functions:

• now(output-format)
• date2str(data,output-format)
• str2date(data,input-format)
• datedif(date1,date2,output-format)

For my current project, I have had to manually edit the source data using Excel, breaking automation - I feel dirty!

Kind Regards Gavin Holt

[derekmahar]

If you could run your data pipeline in Windows Subsystem for Linux or Cygwin, dateutils should meet your requirements.