mojotx / date-manipulator

Simple application for generating RFC3339 timestamps, written in Go. Suitable for use in scripting, e.g., aws cloudwatch commands.

Date Manipulator

Simple application for generating RFC3339 timestamps, written in Go.

Install the program like this:

go install github.com/mojotx/date-manipulator@latest

To get the current UTC timestamp in RFC3339 format, just run the binary:

$ date-manipulator
2021-06-02T20:56:32Z

To get the UTC timestamp of 15 minutes ago, specify a valid Go time.Duration string, like this:

$ date-manipulator -15m
2021-06-02T20:43:38Z

To see 15 minutes ago, as well as current time, assuming Bash as your shell:

printf "Past %22s\n Now %22s\n" $(date-manipulator -15m) $(date-manipulator)
Past   2021-06-02T20:47:19Z
 Now   2021-06-02T21:02:19Z

Note that there are multiple time.Duration units suffixes, including "ns", "us" (or "µs"), "ms", "s", "m", and "h".

$ date-manipulator ; date-manipulator 12h
2021-06-02T21:05:45Z
2021-06-03T09:05:45Z

I wrote this for scripting cloud things, such as AWS CLI commands. For instance, to see CPU utilization for the past 12 hours in JSON format:

$ aws cloudwatch get-metric-statistics \
    --namespace AWS/RDS \
    --metric-name CPUUtilization \
    --period 60 \
    --statistics Maximum \
    --dimensions Name=DBInstanceIdentifier,Value=some-database-cluster \
    --start-time $( date-manipulator -12h ) \
    --end-time   $( date-manipulator      )

This is licensed under the MIT license. If you find it useful, great!