How create an identical timestamp format as used in ppp.log file in a shell script?
After a lot of searching, a search for &quot;date format without alphabetic time zone abbreviation&quot; returned Info on ISO 8601, the date and time representation standard. That information helped me to find out that the timestamp format that is being used in Mavericks its /private/var/log/ppp.log file, is actually the ANSI C's asctime() format.
C asctime
To create C style asctime in a shell, a non English system might need to override the environment variable for time messages:
export LC_TIME=&quot;C&quot;

And then there is the $ date formatting option %c that now displays local date time in the desired format:
$ date +%c
Sat Apr  9 21:10:20 2016


A tip when using echo date, do put the date between apostrophes echo &quot;$(date +%c)&quot;, otherwise the filler space in single digit dates might be stripped from the output:
$ echo $(date +%c)
Sat Apr 9 21:13:57 2016
$ echo &quot;$(date +%c)&quot;
Sat Apr  9 21:14:30 2016