[PLUG] date formatting in a shell script

[Chad V <csv@gamebox.net>]

I'm working on a script that will figure out average requests per
second and the max RPS for a web server.  Unfortunately, the log file
doesn't put the date & time into a standard format.

Here are 2 lines from the tab separated log file  (xxx where data was
but needs to stay anonymous such as IP, host, file, etc):

INFO 	20080501043217440	00000000000000000005	9569	34353	0	tcpConnection-17000-6	xxx	xxx	xxx	xxx	xxx	xxx	-	-	0	0	-	0	0	-	0	0		0	0	xxx
INFO 	20080501043219725	00000000000000000006	7287	34353	0	tcpConnection-17000-7	xxx	xxx	xxx	xxx	xxx	xxx	-	-	0	0	-	0	0	-	0	0		0	0	xxx


The date looks like it includes:  YEAR MONTH DAY HOUR MINUTE SECOND
MILLISECOND (last 3 digits).

I can use awk to grab the 2nd field and load that into a variable, but
I'm brain dead on where to go from there.  I want to end up with an
output such as 2008-05-01 04:32:17.440.   From there, I should be able
to perform math operations on the dates.

I tried using the `date -d 20080501043217` without the ms field, but
it couldn't interpret it.

Any ideas on how to get the string into the format I want?  I don't
want to do simple substitution (i.e. 2008  =  2008-, 05 = 05-) because
it should be generic enough to work on any date string in this screwy
format.

Thanks for any help.

Chad
___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug