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Comment by mkmk | Hacker News Reader

On a mac, you can keep track by opening the terminal and running the command "date +%s" (no quotes).

To see the countdown, you can use:

  while true; do echo $((1500000000 - `date +"%s"`)); sleep 1; done

Sleep 1 means that you could miss it, as the loop will take >1 second to run (the fork isn't instantaneous)

On UNIX likes systems*. Pro-tip: `watch -n 1 date +%s` will give you a live view of the timestamp

Oohhh, didn't know about watch, thanks! If you want it to count down instead:

$ watch -n1 'echo $((1500000000 - $(date +%s)))'

If you have an X server installed, you can also get a windowed unix time clock:

  xclock -utime -update 1

I tried this and noticed that you forgot -digital, which is apparently necessarily for -utime to have any effect.

    while true; do date +%s; sleep 1; done

watch date +%s