Formatting date strings in a file with linux bash shell

Question

When I cat the file an example of the output format is:

ok: servername Mon May 23 00:00:00 EDT 2018
ok: servername Thu Jul 16 00:00:00 EDT 2019

Answer 1

According man date, the command is able to

display time described by STRING, not 'now'

via --date or -d. So if you store your values in a variable

DATE="Thu Jul 16 00:00:00 EDT 2019"

you could use something like

date --date="${DATE}" +%m/%d/%Y

to reformat the timestamp.

For more information you may have a look into Convert date formats in bash.