How to add a timestamp to bash script log?

Solution 1:

You can pipe the script's output through a loop that prefixes the current date and time:

./script.sh | while IFS= read -r line; do printf '%s %s\n' "$(date)" "$line"; done >>/var/log/logfile

If you'll be using this a lot, it's easy to make a bash function to handle the loop:

adddate() {
    while IFS= read -r line; do
        printf '%s %s\n' "$(date)" "$line";
    done
}

./thisscript.sh | adddate >>/var/log/logfile
./thatscript.sh | adddate >>/var/log/logfile
./theotherscript.sh | adddate >>/var/log/logfile

Solution 2:

See ts from the Ubuntu moreutils package:

command | ts

Or, if $command does automatic buffering (requires expect-dev package):

unbuffer command | ts

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Solution 3:

The date command will provide that information

date -u
Sat Sep 10 22:39:24 UTC 2011

so you can

echo $(date -u) "Some message or other"

is that what you wanted ?

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Solution 4:

You can simply echo the command outputs to the logfile. ie,

echo "`date -u` `./script.sh`" >> /var/log/logfile

It really works :)

Example:

[sparx@E1]$ ./script.sh 
Hello Worldy
[sparx@E1]$ echo "`date -u` `./script.sh`" >> logfile.txt
[sparx@E1]$ cat logfile.txt 
Mon Sep 12 20:18:28 UTC 2011 Hello Worldy
[sparx@E1]$ 

---

Solution 5:

Make a config.sh file

#!/usr/bin/env bash
LOGFILE="/path/to/log.log"
TIMESTAMP=`date "+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"`

When you need to send to log file use

#!/usr/bin/env bash
source /path/to/config.sh

echo "$TIMESTAMP Say what you are doing" >> $LOGFILE

do_what_you_want >> $LOGFILE

Log file will looks like

2013-02-03 18:22:30 Say what you are doing

So it will be easy to sort by date