DATE(1) | General Commands Manual | DATE(1) |
date
— display or
set date and time
date |
[-aju ] [-d
dst] [-r
seconds] [-t
minutes_west] [-z
output_zone]
[+ format]
[[[[[[cc]yy]mm]dd]HH]MM[.SS]] |
When invoked without arguments, the date
utility displays the current date and time. Otherwise, depending on the
options specified, date
will set the date and time
or print it in a user-defined way.
Changing the system date has some risks, as described in settimeofday(2). Only the superuser may change the date.
The options are as follows:
-a
-d
dst-j
-r
seconds-t
minutes_west-u
-z
output_zoneTZ
below. This can be used with
-j
to easily convert time specifications from one
zone to another.An operand with a leading plus sign (‘+’) signals a
user-defined format string which specifies the format in which to display
the date and time. The format string may contain any of the conversion
specifications described in the
strftime(3) manual page, as
well as any arbitrary text. A newline
(‘\n
’) character is always output
after the characters specified by the format string. The format string for
the default display is:
%a %b %e %H:%M:%S %Z %Y
If an operand does not have a leading plus sign, it is interpreted as a value for setting the system's notion of the current date and time. The canonical representation for setting the date and time is:
Everything but the minute is optional.
Time changes for Daylight Saving Time, standard time, leap seconds, and leap years are handled automatically.
TZ
-l
option of
zic(8).The date
utility exits 0 on
success, and >0 if an error occurs.
Display the date using the specified format string:
$ date "+DATE: %Y-%m-%d%nTIME: %H:%M:%S" DATE: 1987-11-21 TIME: 13:36:16
Set the date to June 13, 1985, 4:27 PM:
# date 198506131627
Set the time to 2:32 PM, without modifying the date:
# date 1432
adjtime(2), gettimeofday(2), strftime(3), utmp(5), ntpd(8), rdate(8)
The date
utility is compliant with the
IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 (“POSIX.1”)
specification.
The flags [-adjrtz
], as well as the
conversion specifiers ‘%F
’,
‘%G
’,
‘%g
’,
‘%k
’,
‘%l
’,
‘%R
’,
‘%s
’,
‘%v
’, and
‘%+
’, are extensions to that
specification.
This implementation requires the traditional BSD date format, [[[[[cc]yy]mm]dd]HH]MM[.SS], which differs from the X/Open System Interfaces option of the IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 (“POSIX.1”) specification.
A date
command appeared in
Version 1 AT&T UNIX.
September 12, 2016 | OpenBSD-6.1 |