What you're looking for is date --date='06/12/2012 07:21:22' +"%s". Keep in mind that this assumes you're using GNU coreutils, as both --date and the %s format string are GNU extensions. POSIX doesn't specify either of those, so there is no portable way of making such conversion even on POSIX compliant systems.

Consult the appropriate manual page for other versions of date.

Note: bash --date and -d option expects the date in US or ISO8601 format, i.e. mm/dd/yyyy or yyyy-mm-dd, not in UK, EU, or any other format.

For Linux, run this command:

date -d '06/12/2012 07:21:22' +"%s"

For macOS, run this command:

date -j -u -f "%a %b %d %T %Z %Y" "Tue Sep 28 19:35:15 EDT 2010" "+%s"

A lot of these answers overly complicated and also missing how to use variables. This is how you would do it more simply on standard Linux system (as previously mentioned the date command would have to be adjusted for Mac Users) :

Sample script:

#!/bin/bash
orig="Apr 28 07:50:01"
epoch=$(date -d "${orig}" +"%s")
epoch_to_date=$(date -d @$epoch +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S)    

echo "RESULTS:"
echo "original = $orig"
echo "epoch conv = $epoch"
echo "epoch to human readable time stamp = $epoch_to_date"

Results in :

RESULTS:
original = Apr 28 07:50:01
epoch conv = 1524916201 
epoch to human readable time stamp = 20180428_075001

Or as a function :

# -- Converts from human to epoch or epoch to human, specifically "Apr 28 07:50:01" human.
#    typeset now=$(date +"%s")
#    typeset now_human_date=$(convert_cron_time "human" "$now")

function convert_cron_time() {
    case "${1,,}" in
        epoch)
            # human to epoch (eg. "Apr 28 07:50:01" to 1524916201)
            echo $(date -d "${2}" +"%s")
            ;;
        human)
            # epoch to human (eg. 1524916201 to "Apr 28 07:50:01")
            echo $(date -d "@${2}" +"%b %d %H:%M:%S")
            ;;
    esac
}

Just be sure what timezone you want to use.

datetime="06/12/2012 07:21:22"

Most popular use takes machine timezone.

date -d "$datetime" +"%s" #depends on local timezone, my output = "1339456882"

But in case you intentionally want to pass UTC datetime and you want proper timezone you need to add -u flag. Otherwise you convert it from your local timezone.

date -u -d "$datetime" +"%s" #general output = "1339485682"

Efficient way to convert date time string to epoch in bash

Avoiding useless repetitives forks, in order to make this translation a lot quicker...

Instead of running 1 fork for each translation, we could run date -f - +%s as background process...

Intro

Common syntax:

epochDate=$(date -d "$InputDate" +%s)

Work fine, but become heavy if run repetetively!

In this post, you will find

• a Quick Demo, following this,
• some Explanations,
• a Function useable for many Un*x tools (bc, rot13, sed...).

Quick Demo

fifo=$HOME/.fifoDate-$$
mkfifo $fifo
exec 5> >(exec stdbuf -o0 date -f - +%s >$fifo 2>&1)
echo now 1>&5
exec 6< $fifo
rm $fifo
read -t 1 -u 6 now
echo $now

This must output current UNIXTIME. From there, you could compare

time for i in {1..5000};do echo >&5 "now" ; read -t 1 -u6 ans;done
real    0m0.298s
user    0m0.132s
sys     0m0.096s

and:

time for i in {1..5000};do ans=$(date +%s -d "now");done 
real    0m6.826s
user    0m0.256s
sys     0m1.364s

From more than 6 seconds to less than a half second!!(on my host).

You could check echo $ans, replace "now" by "2019-25-12 20:10:00" and so on...

Optionaly, you could, once requirement of date subprocess ended:

exec 5>&- ; exec 6<&-