awk - too many open files issue / date parsing [duplicate]

Question

I'm trying to parse a log file that starts with a formatted date column: 06/22/2015 00:17:59

I'm using the following code to convert it into a unix timestamp:

unix="date -d\""$1" "$2"\" \"+%s\""; unix | getline timestamp;

However, when I do this, awk fails with following error:

awk: (FILENAME=/dev/fd/63 FNR=263350) fatal: cannot open pipe 'date -d"06/22/2015 00:17:59" "+%s"' (Too many open files)

Any way to deal with this, or to parse the date differently?

Answer 1

Your problem is that you need to close your command:

unix="date -d\""$1" "$2"\" \"+%s\""; unix | getline timestamp; close(unix)

If you don't do this, a new pipe is opened for each record in your input file, which leads to the problem that you are experiencing.