My solution to such "risks" is to put things into aliases or shell functions. Or, as a more general advice: know your scripting language(s). For example: perl

My solution to such "risks" is to put things into aliases or shell functions. Or, as a more general advice: know your scripting language(s). For example: perl -e 'print scalar localtime 1700000000' returns the readable date and could be the start of a script to do even more with such timestsamps, e.g. converting log files passed on stdin.