Exact times in "docker ps" and "docker images"

Question

docker ps and docker images express times in a rather vague fashion, e.g. "About an hour ago" or "2 days ago". How can I discover the exact times?

Answer 1

Use docker inspect:

docker inspect -f '{{ .Created }}' IMAGE_OR_CONTAINER

Answer 2

The question is asking how to display the exact times when using docker ps and docker images. This can be accomplished directly with a format argument, using CreatedAt

$ docker ps --format 'table {{.ID}}\t{{.Command}}\t{{.CreatedAt}}'
CONTAINER ID        COMMAND                  CREATED AT
86baa3a5058a        "./env.sh catalina.s…"   2019-10-30 08:30:15 -0400 EDT   
1eb21e95119d        "./env.sh catalina.s…"   2019-10-30 06:58:34 -0400 EDT   
87be4be4c328        "docker-entrypoint.s…"   2019-10-30 06:58:33 -0400 EDT   
e4ab699631c8        "./env.sh catalina.s…"   2019-10-30 06:58:32 -0400 EDT   

The table specification adds the headers. The legal format fields are documented, for example at https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/ps/#formatting, but mostly correspond to the capitalized column headers, so you could add {{.Ports}} to the format above.

docker inspect (from this answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/28203469/500902) can be used to display the time for a single image or container, uses a different format property {{.Created}} and displays the time format slightly differently, for no obvious reason.