Q:

Bash: calculate the time elapsed between two timestamps

I have written a script that notifies me when a value is not within a given range. All values "out of range" are logged in a set of per day files.
Every line is timestamped in a proprietary reverse way:
    yyyymmddHHMMSS
Now, I would like to refine the script, and receive notifications just when at least 60 minutes are passed since the last notification for the given out of range value.
I already solved the issue to print the logs in reverse ordered way with:
for i in $(ls -t /var/log/logfolder/*); do zcat $i|tac|grep \!\!\!|grep --color KEYFORVALUE; done

that results in:
...
20170817041001 - WARNING: KEYFORVALUE=252.36 is not between 225 and 245 (!!!)
20170817040001 - WARNING: KEYFORVALUE=254.35 is not between 225 and 245 (!!!)
20170817035001 - WARNING: KEYFORVALUE=254.55 is not between 225 and 245 (!!!)
20170817034001 - WARNING: KEYFORVALUE=254.58 is not between 225 and 245 (!!!)
20170817033001 - WARNING: KEYFORVALUE=255.32 is not between 225 and 245 (!!!)
20170817032001 - WARNING: KEYFORVALUE=254.99 is not between 225 and 245 (!!!)
20170817031001 - WARNING: KEYFORVALUE=255.95 is not between 225 and 245 (!!!)
20170817030001 - WARNING: KEYFORVALUE=255.43 is not between 225 and 245 (!!!)
20170817025001 - WARNING: KEYFORVALUE=255.26 is not between 225 and 245 (!!!)
20170817024001 - WARNING: KEYFORVALUE=255.42 is not between 225 and 245 (!!!)
20170817012001 - WARNING: KEYFORVALUE=252.04 is not between 225 and 245 (!!!)
...

Anyway, I'm stuck at calculating the number of seconds between two of those timestamps, for instance:
20170817040001
20160312000101

What should I do in order to calculate the time elapsed between two timestamps?

A:

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.)

A:

This is easy with datediff command provided in dateutils package. 
ddiff -i '%Y%m%d%H%M%S' 20170817040001 20160312000101

