Show system birthday

[tudurom]

On Linux it's easy: you can read the day when /lost+found was created.

[dylanaraps]

Sounds like something fun to add, I'll add it to my TODO list.

[dylanaraps]

What does this command output? ls -alct / |tail -1 | awk '{print $6, $7, $8}'

If the command above doesn't work then I'm not sure about how we can get
this information without root privileges.

[ladislavskufca]

System birthday like time when it was installed? I am getting "Oct 11 00:01" but thats not even close to my OS X birthday. 😄

[dylanaraps]

Yup!

I can't seem to get the correct value without root privileges which means that this feature won't be coming any time soon.

[ladislavskufca]

After some digging in system logs here in OS X (should I stop saying OS X, because I think that you already found out that its my system 😄 ), I found that Oct 11 is pretty accurate actually. Found out I made clean install off OS X on Oct 10! But year is still missing in your command (and you can't just grep it from ll, or?).

[dylanaraps]

What does this command output? This is the same as above but it'll print more info.

ls -alct / | tail -1

[ladislavskufca]

d-wx-wx-wt 2 root wheel 68 Oct 11 00:01 .Trashes

[dylanaraps]

Ah, we still don't get the year.

[dylanaraps]

I can't seem to find any other way of getting the birthday without requiring root.

[ladislavskufca]

Actually, you can. Your ls -alct / | tail -1 is missing -T, which, refering to manual does:

When used with the -l (lowercase letter ``ell'') option, display complete
time information for the file, including month, day, hour, minute, second,
and year.

So yeah, running ls -alctT / | tail -1 returns d-wx-wx-wt 2 root wheel 68 Oct 11 00:01:17 2015 .Trashes which is awesome! Just awk that.

[dylanaraps]

Oh neat!

Ok, it turns out that the flag is different on linux. It's --full-time here and it prints a similar output. I'll start work on adding this now! :)

[tudurom]

Another option would be getting the birthday in an OS-specific manner. For example, on Arch you can get the OS birthday by reading the first line in /var/log/pacman.log. This command prints the date and time when the OS got installed.

head -n 1 /var/log/pacman.log | tr -d '[]' | awk '{print $1, $2}'

Prints: 2015-11-27 16:40.

A similar command can be used on Ubuntu based OS's.

[dylanaraps]

The simpler we can get the function to be the better, does ls -alct --full-time / | tail -1 include the birthdate for you @tudurom?

[tudurom]

Yeah, it works. A better variant is this:

ls -alct --full-time / | tail -1 | awk '{print $6}'

[ladislavskufca]

Oh ok, if command here is different and you have to "if" them for different distros, please use this one for OS X then: ls -alctT /var/log/CDIS.custom.
Prints out: -rw-r--r--@ 1 root wheel 12 Oct 11 07:18:56 2015 /var/log/CDIS.custom.
It is more accurate because it represents first time the installer was started: Oct 11 07:18:56 2015.

[dylanaraps]

@tudurom: Awesome!

@mclado:

• Will this work for every OS X system?
• Do we need the tail -1 part for this new command?

[ladislavskufca]

Yes, CDIS.custom is always here. Even in cases where installer fails and even in older OS X versions.

[dylanaraps]

Awesome!

[dylanaraps]

I'll also add a config option to convert the output to a prettier format. So 2015-11-27 will be converted to 27th November 2015 and etc.

[tudurom]

Didn't specified; the above command yields 2015-11-27.

An even better one would be

ls -alct --full-time / | tail -1 | tr ':' ' ' | awk '{print $6, $7 ":" $8}'

That shows 2015-11-27 00:39.

[dylanaraps]

The ls -alct --full-time / gives me a totally different output when run from inside the script. I'm confused as to why.

Birthday: 1970-01-01 10:00

[tudurom]

Try this:

ls -alct --full-time / | grep "lost+found"

[dylanaraps]

This works, awesome!

[dylanaraps]

I pushed a version for you guys to test to master. The birthday line is disabled by default and can be enabled with info "Birthday" birthday.

What does the output look like?

[ladislavskufca]

Fine with me.
Whats wrong with font?

View post on imgur.com

<script async src="//s.imgur.com/min/embed.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

[dylanaraps]

The font is the GTK theme font.

[tudurom]

Looks good. Another enhancement would be specifying if you want to show the time.

[dylanaraps]

I'm working on converting the output to a prettier format, here's what mine looks like now:

What do you guys think?

[dylanaraps]

Another enhancement would be specifying if you want to show the time.

I'll add this too!

[tudurom]

What the hell that's too small.

[dylanaraps]

It takes a while to get used to it. :)

[tudurom]

I will end this off-topic discussion by saying my font's called erusfont. Sorry for spamming, watchers and issue contributors.

[tudurom]

May I close this issue?

[dylanaraps]

I'm about to push the finished function, lets leave this open until you guys test it out.

[dylanaraps]

I just pushed it to master.

There are two new flags/options:

• --birthday_shorthand and $birthday_shorthand to shorten/lengthen
  the output of birthday.
• --birthday_time and $birthday_time to show/hide the time in the output.

If it works, we can close the issue!

[tudurom]

In my case it works. Does it work on Windows?

[dylanaraps]

I'm testing BSD at the moment and it doesn't work. I'll check Windows now.

[ladislavskufca]

OS X: not working, its blank except if I use --birthday_shorthand flag.

[dylanaraps]

Can I see the shorthand output?

[ladislavskufca]

Birthday: Oct 11 2015 07:18

[dylanaraps]

What's the output of date -d"Oct 11 2015 07:18" "+%a %d %b %Y %l:%M %p"?

[ladislavskufca]

Ugh, something is different. Again.

usage: date [-jnu] [-d dst] [-r seconds] [-t west] [-v[+|-]val[ymwdHMS]] ... [-f fmt date | [[[mm]dd]HH]MM[[cc]yy][.ss]] [+format]

[dylanaraps]

This is the error I was looking for! :)

[dylanaraps]

Look in man date and tell me what the description of the -d flag is.

This is what it is on linux:

-d, --date=STRING
          display time described by STRING, not 'now'

[ladislavskufca]

Check this out. https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/date.1.html
Also some examples below.

[dylanaraps]

Thanks

[dylanaraps]

What about this command?

date -j -f"Oct 11 2015 07:18" "+%a %d %b %Y %l:%M %p"

[ladislavskufca]

Nope :/

[dylanaraps]

What about this?

date -j -f "%a %d %b %Y %l:%M %p" "Oct 11 2015 07:18" "+%s"

[ladislavskufca]

It says illegal time format. This "+%s" actually just converts date to seconds or smth, because running date -j -f "%a %b %d %T %Z %Y" "date" does Sat Jan 30 13:10:18 CET 2016 and appending "+%s" converts to 1454155814.

[dylanaraps]

Awesome, we just need to use the right time format now!

[dylanaraps]

Also BSD and OS X share the same date flags, so I'm booting up a virtual machine to test.

[dylanaraps]

I've figured it out! :)

I'll push it to master in a sec.

[ladislavskufca]

Works like charm now. Except --birthday_time flag does nothing.

[dylanaraps]

Weird, I'll see if I can reproduce this.

[ladislavskufca]

Oh sorry, my bad. Works in all combinations! You can close this now.

[dylanaraps]

Awesome!

The function still doesn't work with BSD and Windows but I can work on this locally.