timeglyph

Decode any timestamp. Identify the unknown ones. See time itself.

Every examination throws raw timestamps at you — a 133801920000000000 buried in an artifact — that you need in human-readable time. timeglyph reads that value every way a system might have written it and reports the results ranked, scored, and cited — honest about the ambiguity instead of guessing one answer. Convert in bulk from a CSV, hover the number on screen and read the time live, or lay a month out as a forensic calendar — DST fold/gap days, leap seconds, GPS week, format epochs, and the moon's phase, all flagged. No more copying each value into a converter app. One static Rust binary, plus a live overlay that decodes whatever is under your cursor.

Try it in your browser → · Full documentation →

The playground runs the real engine as WebAssembly, entirely client-side — paste a value, see every ranked, cited reading; nothing leaves the page.

$ timeglyph 1577836800
# readings consistent with 1577836800 (ranked; a raw value is usually underdetermined — not a single verdict):
  [1.00] unix           2020-01-01T00:00:00Z  (Unix time (seconds))
  [0.94] postgres       2000-01-01T00:26:17.8368Z  (PostgreSQL timestamp (µs since 2000))
  [0.67] cocoa          2051-01-01T00:00:00Z  (Cocoa / CFAbsoluteTime (s since 2001))
  [0.67] hfsplus        1953-12-31T00:00:00Z  (Apple HFS+ (s since 1904))
  ...

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Install

macOS

brew install securityronin/tap/timeglyph

Debian / Ubuntu

curl -1sLf 'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/securityronin/timeglyph/setup.deb.sh' | sudo -E bash
sudo apt install timeglyph

Windows

winget install SecurityRonin.timeglyph

Cargo

cargo install timeglyph

On macOS and Windows this also installs the timeglyph-lens overlay.

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What you do with it

Identify an unknown value

timeglyph 1577836800                    # ranked, scored readings across every format
timeglyph identify --json 1577836800    # same, machine-readable
timeglyph --as hex 0060947C58B2D501     # raw bytes only: little/big-endian + packed on-disk
timeglyph --as string 20200101000000Z   # string forms only: ISO / RFC 2822 / ASN.1

Exit codes are pipeline-safe: 0 clear top reading, 2 ambiguous or a sentinel (review needed), 1 error. Render in any timezone with --tz (UTC, a fixed offset, or a DST-correct IANA name); nudge readings toward a source family with --artifact "<hint>".

Decode or encode a known format

timeglyph decode filetime 132223104000000000
timeglyph decode fat 1545691136          # FAT/DOS packed date+time (LOCAL) — one of 45 formats
timeglyph encode unix 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z
timeglyph explain filetime               # a spec card: epoch, tick, tz/leap, range, sentinels, citation
timeglyph list                           # the format registry, with spec citations

Mine artifacts at scale

timeglyph scan app.log                  # find & decode every timestamp in text (or stdin)
timeglyph carve aabbcc… --from 2015 --to 2026 --json   # carve timestamps at every byte offset
timeglyph csv events.csv                # enrich a CSV with human-readable timestamp columns

Convert in bulk: enrich a whole CSV of timestamps in one pass instead of pasting them into a converter one at a time. carve sweeps a raw blob (a config, a record, a hex selection) for timestamps at every offset — window- and score-thresholded — and exports JSONL, ImHex bookmarks, or Timesketch events.

CSV enrichment →

See time itself — the forensic calendar

timeglyph cal                     # this month, with DST/leap/epoch markers
timeglyph cal 2026-11 --tz America/New_York   # DST fold/gap days flagged
timeglyph cal 2026-09-18          # one day in full: week/epoch systems + a moon disc
timeglyph cal 2026 --json         # a whole year, faithful per-day records

cal is a calendar built for temporal analysis: per-day UTC offset and DST fold/gap days, leap-second days and GPS week, ISO week / Julian Day / Unix, timestamp-format epoch and rollover markers, seven alternative calendars (Chinese lunisolar with the 干支 four pillars, plus ROC, Japanese, Buddhist, Hebrew, Islamic, and Persian), and the moon's phase — every value computed and oracle-validated (date, zdump, USNO, IERS, JPL).

The forensic calendar →

Use it from an LLM / agent

timeglyph mcp                           # a Model Context Protocol stdio server

mcp exposes identify / decode / explain as MCP tools, so an LLM-driven DFIR workflow gets a cited, reproducible reading instead of a hallucinated epoch conversion.

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TimeGlyph Lens — hover anything, decode time data

Convert live: hover any number on screen and read its time in real time. An always-on-top overlay follows your cursor and shows timeglyph's ranked readings for the number in the UI element under the pointer, so you never copy a value into a converter. Each row carries its confidence, the weekday, and the public holiday for that date in the chosen zone. Pick any display timezone from the footer.

It installs with the CLI on macOS and Windows and reads the element under the cursor through the platform accessibility layer — the Accessibility API on macOS, UI Automation on Windows. (Linux support is in progress.)

Overlay guide →

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Formats

timeglyph decodes and auto-identifies 45 registered formats plus the self-describing string forms:

• Epoch integers & floats — Unix (s/ms/µs/ns and double), FILETIME (incl. Active Directory / LDAP), WebKit/Chrome, Cocoa / CFAbsoluteTime (integer, signed double, iOS-11 ns), Apple HFS+/HFS, .NET ticks, OLE automation, Excel-1904, PostgreSQL, Mozilla PRTime, SQLite Julian day, DHCPv6, Modified Julian Day
• Embedded IDs — KSUID, ULID, UUIDv1 / v6 / v7, MongoDB ObjectId, GMail message IDs, and Snowflake-class IDs (Twitter/X, Discord, Mastodon, LinkedIn, TikTok, Sonyflake)
• Packed & mobile/broadcast — FAT/DOS and exFAT date-time words, 128-bit SYSTEMTIME structs, Microsoft DTTM, BCD, GSM 7-byte semi-octet, Nokia, DVR, Motorola, Symantec, and SQL Server DATETIME
• Strings — ISO 8601 / RFC 3339, RFC 2822 email dates, EXIF, ASN.1 GeneralizedTime & UTCTime
• Leap-aware scales (--features leap) — GPS, TAI64, NTP, kept separate from the POSIX spine

Every reading names the spec it assumes and is scored on window membership, granularity, magnitude, byte-width, endianness, artifact context, and neighbour monotonicity. Correctness is checked against primary-spec worked examples and the MIT time_decode oracle — see validation.

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Why another converter?

Good ones exist (time_decode, MIT; DCode, proprietary). timeglyph is a single static Rust binary built on a rigorous, cited model where a reading is evidence, not a verdict: a POSIX-correct internal spine (never mislabelled UTC), the leap-second family kept separate, and ambiguity as first-class, scored output. Calendar and timezone math is reused (jiff), never reinvented. See the design decisions.

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