Quick and Simple Timestamping of Debug Logs

I’ve been having some issues that may be Puppet-related. Unfortunately, Puppet (at least the old 0.25.4 client that I’m running) doesn’t timestamp the debug logs sent to stdout. I know it’s hanging somewhere, but I need concrete numbers to look at. Here’s a wonderfully simple bash script that timestamps everything sent to it on stdin, and echoes it back to stdout:

#!/bin/bash

DATECMD='date +%H:%M:%S'

while read line; do
    echo -e "$($DATECMD) $line"
done

Call it as simply as: command | ~/bin/ts, or maybe like command 2>&1 | ~/bin/ts | tee foo.log. Dead simple, but very helpful when the developers didn’t think to timestamp debug log output.