Is there a Unix utility to prepend timestamps to stdin?

ts from moreutils will prepend a timestamp to every line of input you give it. You can format it using strftime too.

$ echo 'foo bar baz' | ts
Mar 21 18:07:28 foo bar baz
$ echo 'blah blah blah' | ts '%F %T'
2012-03-21 18:07:30 blah blah blah
$ 

To install it:

sudo apt-get install moreutils

Could try using awk:

<command> | awk '{ print strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"), $0; fflush(); }'

You may need to make sure that <command> produces line buffered output, i.e. it flushes its output stream after each line; the timestamp awk adds will be the time that the end of the line appeared on its input pipe.

If awk shows errors, then try gawk instead.

annotate, available via that link or as annotate-output in the Debian devscripts package.

$ echo -e "a\nb\nc" > lines
$ annotate-output cat lines
17:00:47 I: Started cat lines
17:00:47 O: a
17:00:47 O: b
17:00:47 O: c
17:00:47 I: Finished with exitcode 0