Parse ps' "etime" output and convert it into seconds

With awk:

#!/usr/bin/awk -f  
BEGIN { FS = ":" }
{
  if (NF == 2) {
    print $1*60 + $2
  } else if (NF == 3) {
    split($1, a, "-");
    if (a[2] != "" ) {
      print ((a[1]*24+a[2])*60 + $2) * 60 + $3;
    } else {
      print ($1*60 + $2) * 60 + $3;
    }
  }
}

Run with :

awk -f script.awk datafile

Output:

1880790
55717
2894
1

And finally, if you want to pipe to the parser, you can do something like this:

ps h -eo etime | ./script.awk

Yet another bash solution, which works any number of fields:

ps -p $pid -oetime= | tr '-' ':' | awk -F: '{ total=0; m=1; } { for (i=0; i < NF; i++) {total += $(NF-i)*m; m *= i >= 2 ? 24 : 60 }} {print total}'

Explanation:

1. replace - to : so that string becomes 1:2:3:4 instead of '1-2:3:4', set total to 0 and multiplier to 1
2. split by :, start with the last field (seconds), multiply it by m = 1, add to total second number, m becomes 60 (seconds in a minute)
3. add minutes fields multiplied by 60, m becomes 3600
4. add hours * 3600
5. add days * 3600 * 24

Here's mine Perl one liner:

ps -eo pid,comm,etime | perl -ane '@t=reverse split(/[:-]/,$F[2]); $s=$t[0]+$t[1]*60+$t[2]*3600+$t[3]*86400; print "$F[0]\t$F[1]\t$F[2]\t$s\n"'

Undefined values are rendering to zero, so they won't have effect on the sum of seconds.

Think I might be missing the point here but the simplest way of doing this is:

ps h -eo etimes

Note the 's' on the end of etime.

Try to use my solution with sed+awk:

ps --pid $YOUR_PID -o etime= | sed 's/:\|-/ /g;' |\ 
awk '{print $4" "$3" "$2" "$1}' |\
awk '{print $1+$2*60+$3*3600+$4*86400}'

it splits the string with sed, then inverts the numbers backwards ("DD hh mm ss" -> "ss mm hh DD") and calculates them with awk.

Also you can play with sed and remove all non-numeric characters from input string:

sed 's/[^0-9]/ /g;' | awk '{print $4" "$3" "$2" "$1}' | awk '{print $1+$2*60+$3*3600+$4*86400}'