I want to know the time duration since a systemd service was started, using the --property=ActiveEnterTimestamp i can see the time it has started, and i would like to compare it with current time and get a value in seconds or minutes, how can i achieve this with bash

If i use this solution i am getting a string, but i cannot actually get any time object to make the decision, any help on this would be appreciated.

CodePudding user response：

You could use GNU date to convert the ActiveEnterTimestamp value to seconds-since-the-epoch, then subtract the current seconds-since-the-epoch to get the running time in seconds.

servicestartsec=$(date -d "$(systemctl show --property=ActiveEnterTimestamp your-service-here | cut -d= -f2)"  %s)
serviceelapsedsec=$(( $(date  %s) - servicestartsec))

Substitute "your-service-here" for your actual service name.

The first line assigns the start time in seconds by extracting the date portion of systemctl show --property=ActiveEnterTimestamp... (using cut to extract the second =-delimited field) and then passing it to GNU date and asking for output in seconds-since-the-epoch.

The second line simply subtracts that start time from the current time to get an elapsed time in seconds. Divide that as needed to get elapsed minutes, hours, etc.