How can I embed that into an UNIX Korn shell script? By way of an example here is a perl epoch timestamp conversion used in one of my scripts. LASTUPDATE=$(perl -e '($ss, $mm, $hh, $DD, $MM, $YY) = localtime('${LASTUPDATE}'); printf "%02d\/%02d\/%04d\ %02d\:%02d", $MM +1 , $DD , $YY + 1900, $hh, $mm')