How to get 13 Digit Epoch time in Shell (Ruby Version)

I needed this, because Dendron uses 13-digit epoch time, for created and updated timestamps. While it is not a problem when notes are created from within VSCode (as is expected - since Dendron is a VSCode plugin) - I don’t use VSCode much.

While Dendron has command line tools to create new notes, and notes are markdown only the timestamps are problem.

Hence, the need to create 13-digit epoch time.

date "+%s" can be used to get the epoch time, it only returns 10 digits. Since I don’t care about millisecond precision in my time stamps, I can always add 3 extra 0s at the end, yet it is a hassel.

Hence, the need for solution that does not require manual work 😄

ruby -e "puts (Time.now.to_f * 1000).floor"

At first, it seemed like it didn’t work because I didn’t have puts 😆

looks like, it is also doing the same - add 3 extra 0s at the end, by multiplying by 1000 - except mathematically 😆

Finally, I added this to my espanso configuration file as :

matches:
- trigger: ":utime"
  replace: "{{output}}"
  vars:
    - name: output
      type: shell
      params:
        cmd: "ruby -e 'puts (Time.now.to_f * 1000).floor'"