I’ve been asked this a number of times and always have to look it up, so here are 3 ways to convert a unix timestamp (seconds since Jan 1, 1970 GMT) to a real looking date.
Perl method 1: use the ctime module:

perl -e “require ‘ctime.pl’; print &ctime($EPOCH);”

Perl method 2: use the scalar and localtime functions:

perl -e “print scalar(localtime($EPOCH))”

Awk has a wrapper for the standard C strftime function:

echo $EPOCH|awk ‘{print strftime(”%c”,$1)}’

Here’s a sample script that uses all methods.

!#/bin/bash
EPOCH=1000000000
DATE=$(perl -e “require ‘ctime.pl’; print &ctime($EPOCH);”)
echo $DATE
DATE=$(perl -e “print scalar(localtime($EPOCH))”)
echo $DATE
DATE=$(echo $EPOCH|awk ‘{print strftime(”%c”,$1)}’)
echo $DATE

[update: Thanks to S. Maynard for reminding me of the proper use of quotes and how to avoid using the pipe…]
DATE=$(awk “BEGIN { print strftime(\”%c\”,$EPOCH) }”)

[UPDATE]

A reader found another way listed below. This doesn’t seem to be as portable (The mac ignores the –date and -d is an illegal option).
# date –date=’1970-01-01 1000000000 sec GMT’
Sat Sep 8 20:46:40 CDT 2001

[UPDATE]
# date -d @1000000042
Sun Sep  9 01:47:22 GMT 2001

But this only works on newer versions of date.  It fails on my FC2 server and my Debian Sarge machine, but works fine on Ubuntu Feisty and Debian Etch.