Capture AWS CLI Output With Timestamps On Each Line Of Output

I needed a way to get output from aws cli captured into a log file with timestamps, out of the box the aws cli output has no timestamps in the output. If you execute a aws s3 cp command, something like this:

You will see output like so:

As you can see this does not show a timestamp in each event of output from the aws cli. So I scoured the internet and found out some interesting things. Turns out that aws cli out of the box outputs with carriage returns instead of newlines. So trying standard awk piping methods was not working. Also aws cli has the ability to change the output, so I needed to add a cli parameter to set output to text. Next we needed to use TR to substitute the carriage returns with newlines, finally we can pipe to awk and print a timestamp on each output event from the aws cli. The final command and output looks like this:

Produces the following in the log file which is my desired result:

I hope this helps someone else as it was a bear to solve for me.