Difference in date time

Question

I have 2 variables.

GMDCOMTM which stores the date time Tue Oct  1 13:32:40 2013
GMDRRSTM which stores the date time Tue Oct  2 23:35:33 2013

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Answer 1

Convert dates to %s ---> seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC.

$ date -d"Tue Oct  2 23:35:33 2013" "+%s"
1380749733

So the thing is to get the difference in seconds between both dates using bc as calculator:

$ d1="Tue Oct  1 13:32:40 2013"
$ d2="Tue Oct  2 23:35:33 2013"
$ echo $(date -d"$d2" "+%s") - $(date -d"$d1" "+%s") | bc
122573

Then you can get it into hours, days, with the great function Stéphane Gimenez indicates in UNIX & Linux:

$ displaytime 122573
1 days 10 hours 2 minutes and 53 seconds