Ubuntu – How to convert ‘dmesg’ time format to ‘real’ time format

dmesgtimeUbuntu

I have (for example) this log entry in dmesg output:

[600711.395348] do_trap: 6 callbacks suppressed

Is there a possibility to convert this 'dmesg' time to 'real' time to know, when this event happend?

Best Answer

It looks as if it was implemented recently for Quantal (12.10) : see http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/17829/ .

Basically, dmesg is reported to have a new switch -T, --ctime.

Edit. As another extension on Ignacio's answer, here are some scripts to enhance dmesg output on older systems.

( Note: for the python version of the code shown there, one will want to replace &lt; and &gt; back to <> to make it usable again. )

Finally, for a single value like 600711.395348 one could do

ut=`cut -d' ' -f1 </proc/uptime` 
ts=`date +%s` 
date -d"70-1-1 + $ts sec - $ut sec + $(date +%:::z) hour + 600711.395348 sec" +"%F %T"

and get the event date and time in the local time zone.

( Please note that due to round-off errors the last second digit probably won't be accurate. ) .

Edit(2): Please note that -- as per Womble's comment below, -- this will only work if the machine was not hibernated etc. ( In that case, one shall better look at syslog configs at /etc/*syslog* and check the appropriate files. See also: dmesg vs /var/messages . )

Related Topic