How to get the start time of a long-running Linux process?

Question

Is it possible to get the start time of an old running process? It seems that ps will report the date (not the time) if it wasn\'t started today, and only the y

Answer 1

As a follow-up to Adam Matan's answer, the /proc/ directory's time stamp as such is not necessarily directly useful, but you can use

awk -v RS=')' 'END{print $20}' /proc/12345/stat

to get the start time in clock ticks since system boot.¹

This is a slightly tricky unit to use; see also convert jiffies to seconds for details.

awk -v ticks="$(getconf CLK_TCK)" 'NR==1 { now=$1; next }
    END { printf "%9.0f\n", now - ($20/ticks) }' /proc/uptime RS=')' /proc/12345/stat

This should give you seconds, which you can pass to strftime() to get a (human-readable, or otherwise) timestamp.

awk -v ticks="$(getconf CLK_TCK)" 'NR==1 { now=$1; next }
    END { print strftime("%c", systime() - (now-($20/ticks))) }' /proc/uptime RS=')' /proc/12345/stat

Updated with some fixes from Stephane Chazelas in the comments; thanks as always!

If you only have Mawk, maybe try

awk -v ticks="$(getconf CLK_TCK)" -v epoch="$(date +%s)" '
  NR==1 { now=$1; next }
  END { printf "%9.0f\n", epoch - (now-($20/ticks)) }' /proc/uptime RS=')' /proc/12345/stat |
xargs -i date -d @{}

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¹ man proc; search for starttime.