Doing Time Offsets of HH/MM/SS and getting the MM/DD/YYYY/HH/MM/SS right

Questions & Suggestions
3

With the date command line tool you can “normalize” your dates to Epoch time:

Your first format (with the time zone):

datestringOne="2016-05-01 10:02:32" # -0500
TZ="America/New_York" date -j -f "%Y-%m-%d %T" "$datestringOne" +%s

→ 1462111352

####Your second format:

datestringTwo="5/1/2016 15:02:32"
date -j -f "%m/%d/%Y %T" "$datestringTwo" +%s

→ 1462107752 (depending on your actual time zone)

To the second string I have appended the missing seconds. Otherwise the current seconds would be added by the program.