Is there a better way to display the wall clock time than using the walltimestamp variable?

Question

I want to print the time when starting the probe. After verifying the documents Dtrace I find the built-in variable: walltimestamp. And the Dtrace script likes this:

pid$1::func:entry
{
    trace(walltimestamp);
}  

But walltimestamp- "The current number of nanoseconds since 00:00 Coordinated universal time, January 1, 1970", so the output is like "1389583988106535481". I think this is not easy for the user to understand and want the output to be like "Mon Jan 13 00:00:00 2014". I searched if Dtrace provides type functions ctimein the C programming language, but nothing was found.

Does anyone need to implement a function like ctime? Or is there a better way to display time?

Answer 1

Use printf():

# dtrace -qn 'BEGIN {printf("%Y\n", walltimestamp); exit(0)}'
2014 Jan 13 08:37:56

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