'date' enhancement: flush in format string

[Darko Veberic]

dear developers,

with awk i have been processing large text files where the first field 
was a human-readable date that had to be converted to unix second. for 
this purpose i was using an awk pipe call

{d="date -u -d "$1" +%s"; d | getline t; close(d); print t,...}

where $1 was holding the date string. unfortunately the files contained 
on the order of million such lines and awk was able to process only 
~2000 lines per second. the slowness was mostly due to the spawning of 
the "date" process for each line.

then it occurred to me that i could use "date" as a co-process in awk 
directly, spawning "date" only once and using the date's -f redirected 
to standard input:

BEGIN{d="date -u -f- +%s"}
{print $1 |& d; d |& getline t; print t,...}
END{close(d)}

unfortunately "date" is not flushing its output after each input line is 
processed, resulting in awk's getline deadlock.

enhancement request:
is it possible to add another % symbol to the date output format, say %f 
(not taken yet) which would trigger output flush, ie i would modify my 
example above into

date -u -f- +%s%f

this would really help in my case!

best regards,
%^>
--
darko.

asst.prof.dr. Darko Veberic --------------
Laboratory for Astroparticle Physics
University of Nova Gorica
Vipavska 13, SI-5000 Nova Gorica, Slovenia
mobile: +386 41 860 861
.phone: +386 5 3315 255
...fax: +386 5 3315 385
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Department for Theoretical Physics
Jozef Stefan Institute,
Jamova 39, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
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CERN, NA61/SHINE, 892 R-A16 Z02200
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