Shell – How to get elapsed time from two “text based” dates

Use the time since epoch to easily identify a span of time in a script

man date
%s     seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC
%N     nanoseconds (000000000..999999999)

.

start_time="$(date -u +%s)"
sleep 5
end_time="$(date -u +%s)"

elapsed="$(($end_time-$start_time))"
echo "Total of $elapsed seconds elapsed for process"

 Total of 5 seconds elapsed for process

Bash doesn't support floating point numbers, so you'll need to use a external tool like bc to compare times like 1475705058.042270582-1475705053.040524971

start_time="$(date -u +%s.%N)"
sleep 5
end_time="$(date -u +%s.%N)"

elapsed="$(bc <<<"$end_time-$start_time")"
echo "Total of $elapsed seconds elapsed for process"

 Total of 5.001884264 seconds elapsed for process

This will give you the date in seconds (since the UNIX epoch)

date --date '2017-08-17 04:00:01' +%s    # "1502938801"

And this will give you the date as a readable string from a number of seconds

date --date '@1502938801'    # "17 Aug 2017 04:00:01"

So all that's needed is to convert your date/timestamp into a format that GNU date can understand, use maths to determine the difference, and output the result

datetime1=20170817040001
datetime2=20160312000101

seconds1=$(date --date "$(echo "$datetime1" | sed -nr 's/(....)(..)(..)(..)(..)(..)/\1-\2-\3 \4:\5:\6/p')" +%s)
seconds2=$(date --date "$(echo "$datetime2" | sed -nr 's/(....)(..)(..)(..)(..)(..)/\1-\2-\3 \4:\5:\6/p')" +%s)

delta=$((seconds1 - seconds2))
echo "$delta seconds"    # "45197940 seconds"

We've not provided timezone information here so it assumes local timezone. Your values for the seconds from the datetime will probably be different to mine. (If your values are UTC then you can use date --utc.)