What's the time?

14 quick ways to find the current time on your computer.

Cmd.exe has two built-in commands for the date and time. You have to add the /t option when calling these commands otherwise you are prompted to set the system time:

> date /t
Wed 27/08/2008
> time /t
07:42 PM

GnuWin's date command prints the date, time and time zone:

> date
Wed Aug 27 19:43:23 AUS Eastern Standard Time 2008

You can use the POSIX module in Perl to get the current date and time:

> perl -e "use POSIX; print asctime(localtime());"
Wed Aug 27 19:44:21 2008

Python has a time module similar to Perl's:

> python -c "import time; print time.asctime()"
Wed Aug 27 19:48:07 2008

PHP's time and date functions return an array, which you can dump using the print_r() function:

> php -r "print_r(get_date());"
Array
(
    [seconds] => 49
    [minutes] => 34
    [hours] => 14
    [mday] => 30
    [wday] => 6
    [mon] => 8
    [year] => 2008
    [yday] => 242
    [weekday] => Saturday
    [month] => August
    [0] => 1220070889
)

Ruby has a Time class:

> ruby -e "print Time.now"
Wed Aug 27 19:45:32 +1000 2008

PowerShell has a get-date cmdlet:

> get-date
Wednesday, 27 August 2008 7:50:13 PM

Or use the .Net System.DateTime.Now property in PowerShell:

> [System.DateTime]::Now
Thursday, 28 August 2008 9:53:21 AM

Firefox can tell you the time using the Javascript Date() object. Enter the following statement in your browser's address bar:

javascript:Date()
Wed Aug 27 2008 20:11:27 GMT+1000 (AUS Eastern Standard Time)

MSIE6 has a similar object but the output is different from Firefox's:

javascript:Date()
Thu Aug 28 10:06:59 2008

Groovy (and Java) has a java.util.Date object which defaults to the current time:

new java.util.Date()
Result: Thu Aug 28 09:58:45 EST 2008

Extract Lines with Line Numbers using Gawk, Groovy, Perl, Python and Ruby

More ways to extract a block of text from a stream and prepend the line number to each line.

Below is the Gawk version. The built-in variables NR is the number of the current line and $0 is the content of the current line.

gawk "(NR >= r1 && NR <= r2) {printf("""%4d %s\n""", NR, $0)}"

The Perl and Ruby scripts are exactly the same. The built-in variable $. holds the number of the current line and $_ holds the text of the current line.

perl|ruby -ne "printf '%4d %s', $., $_ if $. >= r1 && $. <= r2"

The Groovy command line options are similar to the Perl and Ruby version, except that you have to separate -n and -e. The built-in variable count holds the number of the current line and line holds the text of the current line.

groovy -n -e "if (count >= r1 && count <= r2) out.format '%4d %s\n', count, line"

The Python version is verbose due to boilerplate code to iterate through all rows in a file:

python -c "import sys; print ''.join('%4d %s' % (r, l) for r, l in enumerate(sys.stdin) if r >= r1 and r <= r2)"

See Also

• PowerShell and Cat Extract Lines with Line Numbers

PS

2008-07-29: Added Groovy version.

Two Hello World Windows in Groovy

Groovy is scripting language on the Java platform. Groovy is interesting because it can be compiled into Java byte-code and makes heavy use of closures.

Groovy Hello World

In the beginning, I ported my Jython version into Groovy. It looks pretty much the same as the Jython version:

// Hello World in Groovy
f = new javax.swing.JFrame("Hello World")
f.setSize(170,70)
f.contentPane.layout = new java.awt.FlowLayout()
f.defaultCloseOperation = javax.swing.JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE
f.add(new javax.swing.JLabel("Label me:"))
f.add(new javax.swing.JButton("Press me"))
f.show()

Groovy + SwingBuilder Hello World

Groovy has a helper class called SwingBuilder to make it much easier to write Swing applications. Here's one way to re-write the program:

// Hello World Window in Groovy + SwingBuilder
sb = new groovy.swing.SwingBuilder()
f = sb.frame(
  title:"Hello World"
  ,size:[170,70]
  ,defaultCloseOperation: javax.swing.JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE) {
  flowLayout()
  label(text:"Label me:")
  button(text:"Press me")
}
f.show()

SwingBuilder is quite wonderful because it allows you to define a GUI with a minimum of code noise. The definition of a JFrame probably maps a keyword X to a setX() function but I haven't worked out how SwingBuilder converts words such as flowLayout(), label and button to Swing objects and functions.